Chapter One
Death Watch
Ten men go to ten doctors. All the doctors tell all the men that
they only have two weeks left to live. Five men cry. Three men rage.
One man smiles. The last man is silent, meditative. Okay, he says.
He has no reaction. The raging men, upon meeting in the lobby, don’t
know what to do with the man of no reaction. They fall upon him and
kill him with their bare hands. The doctor comes out of his office
and apologizes, to the dead man.
Dang it, he says sheepishly, to his colleagues. Looks like I got the
date wrong again.
One can’t account for murder or accidents, says another doctor in
his bright white coat.
The raging, sad men and the smiling man all leave the office. The
smiling man does not know why he is smiling. He just feels relieved.
He was suicidal anyway. Now it’s out of his hands. The others growl
at him, their bare hands blood specked, but the smiler is eerie in
his relief, and so they let him be, thinking he might somehow speed
up their precious two weeks. The raging men tear out the door first;
the crying men follow.
On their way they meet up with a field of cows. The cows are chewing
quietly and calmly. The sight of the cows fills the crying men with
sadness as they only have two weeks left to look at cows. But the
sight of the cows fills the raging men with more rage. After all,
why are the cows so calm? Why is it that cows get to remain ignorant
of their own death? Why is the sky so blue and peaceful? The raging
men run to the cows but the cows don’t notice; the cows want, more
than anything, just to continue chewing. One raging man collapses in
the field and drums it with his fists. The others run and run. The
five crying men stand at the fence, crying. Look at the sad and
large rage of the doomed men, they think. Who knew a cow was so
beautiful? Why was I not a farmer? Why not a field hand? Why an
office building?
Back at the office building, the doctors check their notebooks and
discover an error. Oops. Only two of the five crying men need to be
crying. The other three are in perfect health. The doctors,
embarrassed, call up their patients who are by then crying into the
arms of their crying wives or lovers or pets.
We have some good news! they say. We made a goof. You seem to be in
perfect health. Very sorry about that.
One crying man, new lease on life, moves his family to the
countryside where they raise goats.
The other two go back to their regular routines. A close call.
The last raging man still is drumming his fists on the field. His
lover calls out into the darkness of the night. The lover
understands that his angry man is out there raging against the world
again, this is to be expected, but he does not understand why the
doctor keeps calling.
The suicidal one is another error, but he is impossible to contact.
He has flown by now to Greece and is trying finally to have a
relationship. With only a couple of weeks left, he thinks that for
once he has a good chance of having someone by his bedside when he
dies.
The two remaining crying men die. One with tubes, the other in his
own bed. One of the raging men dies, roaring in his bathtub.
Another, though not a mistake, still drums that field with his
fists. The very energy it takes should drain him dry, but no. He is
happily drumming. He drums for weeks and sits up and isn’t yet dead.
It takes him six months, which he uses to make some angry paintings
that are beloved by people in galleries who are unaware that they
themselves are angry at all.
The Greek woman sobs when she hears that her wonderful melancholy
lover will be dying soon. They do ritual after ritual. Their sex is
like castles; it has moats and turrets. If only, thinks the suicidal
man, if only I had known for longer how short it all would be.
Everybody says this. They say it for us, the nondying, to remember
our daily lives. But we can’t fully get it until we’re right up in
the face of it. Can we get it? It is hard to get. I do not get it.
Only the suicidal man gets it here, and his Greek lover with her
aquiline nose.
On the morning of the third week, the Greek woman returns to her
bedroom with a bouquet of mourning flowers. She has prepared herself
on the walk over for the cold body. She can still feel him inside
her. In the bedroom, her lover says hello. He feels curiously fine.
The Greek woman falls to her knees and calls him a miracle. They
have miracle sex, in honor of miracles. But the next day happens the
same and both are giddy with joy tinged by the slightest bit of
disappointment which they hide behind their love and delight. And
then the next day, and soon the sex is not the same as before. No
longer a castle, now just a hut. The Greek woman’s husband is due
back soon anyway, from his voyage to get silk from China. The
suicidal man goes to the sea to bathe. Some cows walk by, chewing.
He can feel his heart, like the strongest machine, and his
deathbedside fading.
He takes the plane back home and gets off at the layover city, a
city he does not know. He’d bought himself a return ticket even
though he’d assumed, even hoped, he would die in Greece, among
clean-washed buildings and simple color contrast that is enough to
satisfy everything: White on blue. Yellow on blue. Red on white. He
had planned on giving his return ticket to his Greek lover in case
she needed to escape her husband and set up a new life in America.
She was not thrilled, though, by his generous offer. Thank you,
she’d said, but I do not like this television all the time.
The stopover from Athens is in Denver. Not what he pictured. A place
he has never been. He grew up elsewhere, not in or by mountains. So,
so, so. Let’s walk over the streets, he says to himself, and the
first for rent sign he sees, he takes. He does everything the minute
he thinks it-that is, all except suicide. He does not want to be
cheated of his terminal illness.
His illness is not terminal; instead it is temporary. He never
speaks to the doctors who try to leave a message but discover that
the mechanical lady is now answering his phone. But he figures it
out on his own. He thinks possibly he’s one of those people who will
live forever but when he cuts himself shaving he bleeds so profusely
he spells out MORTAL in the sink’s basin with his blood. He joins a
gym. The world of Denver fills him up with coffee in the morning and
walks in the afternoon. He is spending all his money.
Eventually he calls his doctor, because he’s too curious. He
explains to the secretary how he was told he had two weeks to live
and now it’s three years later. The doctor, he hears, has died. From
guilt perhaps? No. The doctor was in a skiing accident.
You can’t account for events like that, he says to himself, going
outside to appreciate the simple color contrast of Colorado: Brown
on blue. Green on brown.
It feels like a trade-off, even though it wasn’t. He returns to his
hometown the next day. There he finds the doctor’s wife and life and
he seduces her with his depressive charm. He is a good new
stepparent. One afternoon the Greek woman shows up on his doorstep.
I have left my husband, she says. I miss you my darling and your
delicate fingertips.
He is brimming with abundance but it’s too late for all of them.
When the bomb hits, the doctors shake their heads at each other as
their bodies disintegrate.
You can never account, they say, for murder, or for accidents.
They are all, at once, at each others’ deathbeds.
End of the Line
The man went to the pet store to buy himself a little man to keep
him company. The pet store was full of dogs with splotches and shy
cats coy and the friendly people got dogs and the independent people
got cats and this man looked around until in the back he found a
cage inside of which was a miniature sofa and tiny TV and one small
attractive brown-haired man, wearing a tweed suit. He looked at the
price tag. The little man was expensive but the big man had a
reliable job and thought this a worthy purchase.
He brought the cage up to the front, paid with his credit card, and
got some free airline points.
In the car, the little man’s cage bounced lightly on the passenger
seat, held by the seat belt.
The big man set up the little man in his bedroom, on the nightstand,
and lifted the latch of the cage open. That’s the first time the
little man looked away from the small TV. He blinked, which was hard
to see, and then asked for some dinner in a high shrill voice. The
big man brought the little man a drop of whiskey inside the indented
crosshatch of a screw, and a thread of chicken with the skin still
on. He had no utensils, so he told the little man to feel free to
eat with his hands, which made the little man irritable. The little
man explained that before he’d been caught he’d been a very
successful and refined technology consultant who’d been to Paris and
Milan multiple times, and that he liked to eat with utensils thank
you very much. The big man laughed and laughed, he thought this
little man he’d bought was so funny. The little man told him in a
clear crisp voice that dollhouse stores were open on weekends and he
needed a bed, please, with an actual pillow, please, and a lamp and
some books with actual pages if at all possible. Please. The big man
chuckled some more and nodded.
The little man sat on his sofa. He stayed up late that first night,
laughing his high shrill laugh at the late-night shows, which
annoyed the big man to no end. He tried to sleep and could not, a
wink. At four a.m., exhausted, the big man put some antihistamine in
the little man’s water-drip tube, so the little man finally got
drowsy. The big man accidentally put too much in, because getting
the right proportions was no easy feat of mathematical skill, which
was not the big man’s strong suit anyway, and the little man stayed
groggy for three days, slugging around his cage, leaving tiny drool
marks on the couch. The big man went to work and thought of the
little man with longing all day, and at five o’clock he dashed home,
so excited he was to see his little man, but he kept finding the
fellow in a state of murk. When the antihistamine finally wore off,
the little man awoke with crystal-clear sinuses, and by then had a
fully furnished room around him, complete with chandelier and
several very short books, including Cinderella in Spanish, and his
very own pet ant in a cage.
The two men got along for about two weeks. The little man was very
good with numbers and helped the big man with his bank statements.
But between bills, the little man also liked to talk about his life
back home and how he’d been captured on his way to work, in a bakery
of all places, by the little-men bounty hunters, and how much he,
the little man, missed his wife and children. The big man had no
wife and no children, and he didn’t like hearing that part. “You’re
mine now,” he told the little man. “I paid good money for you.”
“But I have responsibilities,” said the little man to his owner,
eyes dewy in the light.
“You said you’d take me back,” said the little man.
“I said no such thing,” said the big man, but he couldn’t remember
if he really had or not. He had never been very good with names or
recall.
After about the third week, after learning the personalities of the
little man’s children and grandparents and aunts and uncles, after
hearing about the tenth meal in Paris and how le waiter said the
little man had such good pronunciation, after a description of
singing tenor arias with a mandolin on the train to Tuscany, the big
man took to torturing the little man. When the little man’s back was
turned, the big man snuck a needle-thin droplet of household
cleanser into his water and watched the little man hallucinate all
night long, tossing and turning, retching small pink piles into the
corners of the cage. His little body was so small it was hard to
imagine it hurt that much. How much pain could really be felt in a
space that tiny? The big man slept heavily, assured that his pet was
just exaggerating for show.
The big man started taking sick days at work.
He enjoyed throwing the little man in the air and catching him. The
little man protested in many ways. First he said he didn’t like that
in a firm fatherly voice, then he screamed and cried. The man didn’t
respond so the little man used reason, which worked briefly, saying:
“Look, I’m a man too, I’m just a little man. This is very painful
for me. Even if you don’t like me,” said the little man, “it still
hurts.” The big man listened for a second, but he had come to love
flicking his little man, who wasn’t talking as much anymore about
the art of the baguette, and the little man, starting to bruise and
scar on his body, finally shut his mouth completely. His head ached
and he no longer trusted the water.
He considered his escape. But how? The doorknob is the Empire State
Building. The backyard is an African veldt.
The big man watched TV with the little man. During the show with the
sexy women, he slipped the little man down his pants and just left
him there. The little man poked at the big man’s penis which grew
next to him like Jack’s beanstalk in person, smelling so musty and
earthy it made the little man embarrassed of his own small penis
tucked away in his consultant pants. He knocked his fist into it,
and the beanstalk grew taller and, disturbed, the big man reached
down his pants and flung the little man across the room. The little
man hit a table leg. Woke up in his cage, head throbbing. He hadn’t
even minded much being in the underwear of the big man, because for
the first time since he’d been caught, he’d felt the smallest
glimmer of power.
(Continues…)
Doubleday
Copyright © 2005
Aimee Bender
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-385-50113-7
Excerpted from Willful Creatures
by Aimee Bender
Copyright © 2005 by Aimee Bender.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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