Lincoln Michel - Upright Beasts

“Two of them. The patter of their little feet will keep us awake all night.”

A policewoman comes up and tells us to move along. “Nothing to see here,” she says. “Not even that stuff you’re looking at.”

Patricia and I walk across the road. Her hand brushes mine.

One by one the people on the bridge hurtle into the cold waters, their arms wrapped around microwaves and cordless vacuums. They fall straighter than I ever thought possible.

“Will there be love?”

“That I can’t promise,” I say, “but we can try to fight our way through it together.”

And perhaps seconds later, the people come rocketing back to the surface, having abandoned their appliances. They bob and gasp. And maybe they will have found something down there while starving for air. On the surface, they will seek each other out and cling tightly, saying, “This is what I need. This is what I’ve been waiting for.”

I’m not sure. Patricia and I have walked too far away to see.

“Did you see what Suzy did when her father tossed her into the air?”

“No, I was looking at Jimmy.”

“She screamed. She screamed like a little piglet right until she hit the water.”

“My father is really good at tossing me into the water.”

“Yes, my father can toss me so high I’m afraid I’ll never come down.”

“My father once threw me like ten feet out of the water, and I did two cartwheels in the air before splashing.”

“My father once tossed me so high into the air that I was at eye level with the top of a tall tree, and in that tree was a bird, and that bird unfurled its wings and looked at me in a loving way, like a sister.”

“When I see you and your father in the pool, he is not tossing you or throwing you. Rather, he is holding you under the water, and you are trying to swim between his legs to twist him up, or else clawing his knees, trying to reach the air.”

“Yes. My father is good at tossing, but he is also good at holding.”

“Does he hold you only in the water?”

“No. Many places. Sometimes I will walk into a room and his hand, lying on the armrest of his chair, will begin to twitch.”

“I don’t think I like your father.”

“I hate all fathers. It is the way they touch you.”

“Their hands are swollen. When you are born, they can carry you in their palm. You grow older and taller, and yet their hands never shrink. When one wraps around your shoulder, the weight immobilizes you.”

“And those hands, they can take control of you. You will be standing in the doorway to the kitchen, and on the kitchen table is something wretched, some burnt meat, and in the chair at the table is someone wretched, a boy that has been invited over to talk to you, but whom you already talk to in school and despise. Your mother has dressed you up too, in some frilly dress that would look stupid even on a doll, and you are standing in the doorframe about to retreat, to flee back to your room, where you cannot see or smell any of the wretched things in the kitchen, but as you are about to turn, the hand of your father appears on your shoulder, and it moves through you, it pilots you, and suddenly you are walking into the kitchen even though you didn’t want to go into the kitchen — or maybe it is the dentist’s or a therapist’s office or piano lessons — and the hand just appears there and wills you to enter without your father even speaking, wills itself over the will of your own bones, forcing you into the room even though the hand itself does not move, does not even flinch.”

“. .”

“But even so, those are also the hands that send you cartwheeling through the air above a body of water the exact color of the bottom of a Bomb Pop.”

“My father is not the only one who tosses me out of the water.”

“Oh? And who tosses you? Your filthy brothers?”

“Yes, my brothers. Tossing me together, one on each side, a leg and arm held in the hands of one, the other leg and other arm gripped in the fists of the other. They look at each other and count to a number while swinging me. When they reach the number, they release me. I never know what the number will be. That is part of the game. They tell me a number, but the number they tell me is never the number that prompts my release.”

“Brothers are even worse than fathers. Brothers are fathers in training. They carry a father around in their bellies, and the beard of this father irritates the walls of their stomachs. This is the reason they are angry, all the time, when they see you.”

“I have noticed their hands twitching in a familiar way.”

“They are not the same hands as the hands of fathers, but they share the same hardness.”

“Well, my father and my brothers are not the only ones who toss me out of the water. Sometimes I will wait until the lifeguards rotate shifts, and when Jimmy gets his turn to take a break, he will slide off his white tank top and pull off his red whistle. When I see him do this, I slip into the water. I fill my lungs with as much air as I can and swim underwater from the deep end to the shallow end where Jimmy will be standing, leaning against the wall of the pool, really, when I emerge. He does not say anything, and I cannot look him in the eye. I look down at his stomach. The sun reflects off the mix of water and sunscreen on his chest in a way that hurts my eyes, yet makes me feel protected.”

“And then he tosses you out of the water?”

“Sometimes. If I open my eyes wide enough.”

“He tosses you away.”

“. .”

“. .”

“I can only see his eyes vaguely behind the sunglasses. They are like two beautiful fish in the depths of a muddy lake.”

“They are different eyes when the sunglasses are off.”

“How do you know?”

“Sometimes Jimmy takes me out of the water to a dark place behind the bushes, and he takes off his sunglasses with one hand while the other hand approaches me.”

“And these are the eyes you hate? The eyes that thin to the edge of a knife when he approaches?”

“No, it’s as if his eyes are clouds that have emptied themselves of rain.”

“Like a villain? Like some foreign villain in a cartoon? His left hand stroking his thin early pubescent mustache, his right held high in anger?”

“No, it isn’t like that at all.”

“The way his eyes grab hold of you at the same time his hands do? The way his fingers tear into your shoulder blades as his eyes move closer—”

“No. Jimmy’s hands go other places.”

“Those cold, dead eyes that sting you like a handful of snow sliding down the back of your neck?”

“Not at all.”

“The eyes that are lit with a flame you do not want to recognize?”

“It’s nothing like that.”

“The way his eyes dart back and forth, looking at every point around you but at no point where you are, even as he bears down on you?”

“No! A thousand times no!”

“. .”

“It’s the way he looks at me afterwards, in the light, with a great sadness. . like a father.”

When I grew too big for my room, I forced the door open. My father was waiting for me in his favorite chair.

“I guess you’re a man now,” my father said. “Technically.”

I looked around my father’s room. It was at least three times as large as my room and wrapped itself around mine on two sides in the shape of an L.

“I’ve always hated that room,” I said.

My muscles ached, and I tried to stretch out the kinks.

“I built that room for you, just like my father built this room for me.” My father held out his palms, showing me his callouses.