How They Were Found Part 7

Satiated, the wolf slumbered. His belly rose and fell with each breath, each drunken snore. Inside his swollen stomach he'd trapped little girls and mothers and grandmothers, woodsmen by the dozens. All around them were trees and deer and rabbits and birds and flowers, even the remains of a river, drunk greedily a week or a month before. The wolf himself couldn't remember, had been nearly mad with hunger and thirst, and in his madness had consumed all that he could. The wolf slept on, and when he awoke he was surrounded by the shattered ruins of a cottage, and beyond that a vast field of furrowed, rent dirt. He could no longer feel all those he'd swallowed kicking at his stomach, trying to force their way back out. Satisfied, the wolf grinned-a wolf's grin, all teeth-and then he tried to rise, only to find that his feast had turned hard and heavy as stone. No matter how he struggled, he could not stand, nor crawl against the distended weight of his belly, and soon there was nothing left within the reach of his desperate jaws.

If I told you the wolf deserved this lonely end, that his slow, struggling starvation was justified, then that would be one kind of tale. But he was not a moral wolf, and this was never about to become a moral story, no matter how it ended.

So little yet endured! Just the girl, with her red hood, her red cape, her red-slicked knife, with which she was still slashing her own story to pieces, still discovering new and radiant shapes of pain and pleasure, until all that remained was the last dirge of the wolf, howling with hungered frustration, joined by the cries of her own failing voice, each matching the other's song note for b.l.o.o.d.y note.

MANTODEA.

FROM ACROSS THE BAR, I COULDN'T STOP STARING AT HER, at that breathtaking mouth of hers. Obviously as orally obsessed as I was, she filled that laughing cavity with whatever was close at hand: lime wedges, olives, tiny black straws she chewed between cigarettes. Gallons of vodka or gin, I couldn't see which. She cracked ice cubes between strong white teeth, the sound audible even above the jukebox and the clatter and clack of pool b.a.l.l.s coming together, spiraling apart. I wanted to stick my fist in there, to get her bright red lipstick all over my watchband.

Getting up from my table in the corner, I steadied myself on chair backs and unoffered shoulders. The floor was the sticky history of a thousand spilled nights, and other couples danced between the pool tables and the bathrooms, their shoes making flypaper two-steps to the country-western songs spilling from the jukebox. I weaved between them until I reached the bar, where I took the stool beside the woman.

I lit a cigarette, signaled the bartender for another whiskey with a raised pair of fingers. From up close, the woman was all mouth, the rest of her thin, too thin, hungry and lean like cancer. I wondered about the nutritional value of her life, of everything that pa.s.sed through the furious red smear of her lips. I imagined both our mouths working furiously on each other, kissing with jaws unhinged as snakes.

I turned toward her, lifted my gla.s.s. Tried to remember how to smile without opening my mouth. Felt I probably wasn't doing it exactly right.

Her own mouth said, Whatever it is you're thinking of saying, it's probably the wrong thing.

I waited before I responded. Waited until the urge pa.s.sed to tell her about my old life, about all that I swallowed in the months before the hospital. I wanted to tell her though. Wanted to tell her about the coins and thumbtacks and staples. The handfuls of dirt and crushed light bulbs.

I wanted to tell her that like a lot of poisons you might eat, you have to swallow a lot more drain cleaner than you'd expect, if you're trying to kill yourself. At least, the stuff hadn't worked on me, not as I'd once hoped it would.

What it had done was clear me out, get rid of all kinds of things that had once been stuck inside of me. That had backed me up.

What it had done was take away my lower intestine, give me a short throw of a colon that couldn't handle spicy food or even most solids. No citrus or tomatoes. No milk or milk products.

This new body, it wasn't supposed to be exposed to alcohol, but giving up the booze was never really an option.

What I said to her instead was, I like watching you eat, drink.

I want to buy you a meal.

A meal with courses. Appetizer. Soup. Salad. Fish. Meat. Miniature loaves of bread with mounded pats of b.u.t.ter.

I said, I want to watch you eat desserts that you have to chew and chew. Taffy. Caramels. I want to give you hard candies to suck thin and crush between your molars.

I said, I'd lick all the sticky sugar off your teeth for hours, if you wanted me to.

Her mouth laughed, said, The only meals I eat I find at the bottom of c.o.c.ktail gla.s.ses.

She fished her olive from under her ice cubes and popped it into her mouth, then licked clear liquor off her dripping fingers. I watched a single drop spill down the back of her hand, trace the blue ridge of a vein from knuckle to wrist. I laughed too, but with a hand over my mouth, hiding the teeth destroyed by chewing steel, the gums peeled black by the Drano. She reached over and pulled my hand down, saying, When I was a little girl, I thought mastication and masturbation were exactly the same word.

She had a disorienting smile, and for a moment I didn't know who was aggressing who. She laughed again, slipped off the barstool with a swish of skirt. Drained her gla.s.s.

Her mouth said, It's not love at first sight, but it is something, isn't it?

She walked away, past the pool tables and the dancing couples, their temporary l.u.s.ts. I watched as she pushed through the swing of the bathroom door. I stubbed out my cigarette, finished my drink, then walked toward the bathroom myself, my guts burning and my throat scratched with smoke, my brain brave and dumb as a lizard's. I put my hand on the cool metal panel of the bathroom door. I pushed.

The bathroom was two stalls and a single sink beneath an empty frame that once held a mirror presumably busted by some drunken stumble. She was inside the near stall, the smaller one. There was less room to move than there would have been in the handicapped stall, but there was enough.

The door wouldn't lock, but I didn't care. Her back was to me, that glorious mouth seen only briefly when she looked over her shoulder, the wet slash of her lips framed by the toss of her chopped blond hair. I wanted her to turn around, but I thought she was teasing me, even though she wanted what I wanted or something close enough to count. She didn't look back again, just put her hands against the slick tile wall, planted her feet on each side of the toilet. Waited for me. When I got close, the nape of her neck smelled like bad habits, tasted worse. I didn't care. I wasn't there to feel nice. Neither of us were. She flinched slightly at the sound of my belt buckle striking the porcelain toilet seat, then asked me my name. I whispered a fake one, then told her the truth when she asked me to repeat myself, knowing she'd a.s.sume it was a lie.

Right before I finished, I felt her back arch toward me, felt her hands reaching for my face, pulling it close to hers. Her mouth opened, taking in my cheeks then my nose then my right eye, the whole side of my mouth. I felt her teeth tugging at the scratchy pouch between my ear and my jaw line, wanted her to keep going, to keep devouring me until I was gone.

I'd once thought I wanted to eat something that could end me, but now I knew I really wanted something else, something approximately the opposite. Something this woman could give me.

Later, after it was over, I realized she'd wanted the same thing, that I'd failed her by not tearing her to pieces, by not taking her inside me one bite at a time.

Too focused on myself, what I thought instead-right before I pulled out of her, before she pushed me against the stall divider with her tiny wrists full of their fragile bird bones, and definitely before she slipped past me without giving me the last kiss I so desperately wanted-what I thought then was, This one time will never be enough.

Still misunderstanding everything, what I said was, I'm going to need to see you again.

Her mouth laughed as she exited the bathroom, the sound so loud my ears were already ringing by the time I got my pants up. I raced after her, out of the bar and into the cold parking lot, where I lost her to the night's thick blanket of confusion, its sharp starlight and fuzzed out streetlamps.

I waited for the sound to stop, and eventually it did. Nothing she'd done would turn out to be permanent. Her smell would be gone by morning, and the teeth marks on my face would take less than a week to scab over and then, to my terror, heal completely.

For the first time in months, I went home to my apartment and emptied the kitchen junk drawer onto the dining table. I picked up the tiny nails and paper clips and stubs of pencils and erasers and whatever else I could find and then I jammed them into my system. I considered pouring myself a drink, then stopped and took a long hot swallow from the bottle. I smashed the unnecessary tumbler on the corner of the counter, watched as the cheap gla.s.s shattered everywhere. Stepping carefully so as not to cut my bare feet, I picked up the most wicked shard I could find. I held it in my hand, then set it in my mouth, rested it on my tongue. I swallowed hard, and when I didn't die I went back for more.

THE LEFTOVER.

WHAT HAPPENED WITH ALLISON AND JEFF WAS WHAT WAS HAPPENING ALL THE TIME, to other people Allison knew and, she presumed, to lots of people she didn't know. They had met, dated until it seemed like they should probably move in together, and then lived together until it seemed they should stop. In between, they talked about getting married, about buying a house, about having a family, but they didn't do any of those things. Now they were broken up, and there had been no fighting, no harsh words, just the knowledge that something had ended.

He was gone and she was still here.

That is what she has decided she will say to people when they ask her how she's feeling and if she's all right.

She will say, I am still here. She will say it like it means something all by itself, like quitting or being quit on is the easiest thing in the world.

When Allison wakes up the morning after the breakup, she sits up in bed and listens. She'd dreamed Jeff was there, but of course he isn't. She goes into the bathroom to brush her teeth and take a shower, where the mirror reveals she's wearing one of Jeff's old shirts he must have left behind. She hates missing him so obviously, but tells herself that she put it on after two bottles of red wine and so isn't really responsible for the decision.

As she gets out of the shower and starts toweling off, she hears the television blaring in the living room. She knows she didn't leave it on, as she barely watches it. She wraps her towel around herself, too wet to be running around the apartment, but she doesn't care. Her head's pounding as she charges through the bedroom and into the living room to confront Jeff and tell him to get the h.e.l.l out and then she screams, because the person on the couch is not Jeff.

By the time she's finished, Allison has seen enough that she doesn't have to ask who this person is.

What she has to ask is how this person is. Not on a friendly level, but an existential one.

The intruder isn't Jeff, but improbably, he is Jeff, too. A smaller version of Jeff, maybe four or five feet tall. Smaller, but not younger, although this person does remind her of her Jeff a few years ago. He's got the goatee she made Jeff shave off and he's smoking a cigarette clenched nonchalantly between two thin fingers, even though Allison made her Jeff quit the same time she did.

This miniature imposter, he waves at her with a perfect copy of Jeff's overly enthusiastic wave.

Allison asks, Who are you? How did you get in here?

The tiny man shrugs. He's wearing a t-shirt that Jeff used to wear when they first started dating. Jeff had gotten it from a track meet when he was a runner in high school, and by the time they met it was threadbare and faded. She'd made him throw it out and yet here it was, looking the same as it had that day.

She asks, Can't you talk?

He shakes his head, turns back to the television. Allison doesn't know what to do, so she walks around to the front of the couch and sits beside him. He looks the way old photographs do: recognizable but not too, like someone she used to know but not the person she's just broken up with.

Little Jeff-she doesn't know what else to call him-he looks up at her with a smile as he takes another puff from his cigarette. It's been over a year since she's smelled smoke in the apartment, and the smell makes her both irritated and nostalgic. She opens her mouth, wanting to ask for a cigarette, then represses the urge, as she always does. It's one thing Allison is proud of: When she quits something, she stays quit.

It's a Sunday and Allison doesn't have to work, so she takes Little Jeff to the movies. It's where she and Jeff went on their first date, one of the few places where she can be reasonably sure she won't have to talk for at least two hours. They watch a comedy that Allison swears she's seen before, even though the ticket price a.s.sures her it's a new release. During the beginning of the movie, Little Jeff sits beside her, his eyes fixed on the screen and his hand making a perpetual motion from the popcorn bucket to his mouth and back again. He chomps loudly, irritating her, but before she can say anything he finishes eating, then reaches over and holds her hand, his small fingers cool and comfortable and rea.s.suring in hers.

After the movie, Allison drives them to the chain restaurant closest to the theater. This is where she and Jeff went after their first movie together. She sits across from Little Jeff without saying anything, both of them smiling a bit too much while she tries not to embarra.s.s herself by making a mess of her food. By the time Allison gets home, she's sure this has been the best day she's had in months. All weirdness aside, she's happy, and that's something.

In the apartment, Little Jeff strips to his underwear and climbs into bed, a development Allison isn't comfortable with. She doesn't know what to say, so she goes to sleep on the couch. She thinks again about her first date with Jeff, how she wanted to sleep with him but didn't want him to think badly about her. She wonders what Jeff thought that night. She wonders what Little Jeff is thinking right now.

The next day at work, Allison is supposed to be proofreading the newest edition of a calculus textbook, but there's no way she can concentrate. What she does instead is search the internet: Doppelganger. Clone. Homunculus. She follows the links from one site to the next, trying to find a description that at least approximates the person in her living room.

What she finds is nothing very useful.

She opens a new doc.u.ment and types CHARACTERISTICS OF LITTLE JEFF then makes a list: Smoker. Doesn't like health food. Chews with his mouth open. Watches too much television. Doesn't put his clothes in the hamper.

It doesn't take her long to recognize the pattern, to see that what Little Jeff is made of is all that she made her first Jeff quit or change or give up. She's lost her boyfriend and gained all the things she hated about him, and yet she wishes she could be home instead of at work. She thinks about calling Jeff but she knows she'll sound crazy, so she calls her apartment instead.

Little Jeff answers on the third ring but doesn't speak. Allison says, I just called to make sure you're okay.

Allison doesn't know what to say next, what she expected to happen. She holds the phone to her ear a little longer, listening to Little Jeff breathe, and then she says goodbye and hangs up the phone. She decides that on the way home she'll pick up a bucket of fried chicken and some mashed potatoes. Once upon a time, it was Jeff's favorite food.

Allison once again gets used to dirty clothes on the floor, socks under the coffee table, skid-marked underwear kicked beside the tub. After a week, she's used to the fact that even though she works all day she's still going to have to do the dishes when she comes home. Ditto for cooking dinner, for doing laundry, for making sure the rent gets paid on time.

The next cable bill that comes, she's furious at the seven dollars and ninety-nine cents she's been billed for a p.o.r.no. She charges into the living room with the bill clenched in her hand, but then she remembers how she freaked out when Jeff did the same thing, thinking he wouldn't get caught, and how her yelling didn't do either of them any good.

During this same time period, she comes to understand that it's not only the bad habits Jeff quit that make up Little Jeff. There are also qualities that Allison forgot she even missed, because they've been gone so long or because they disappeared from her and Jeff's relationship without announcing their departure. She notices the long absence of these traits only when they reemerge: Little Jeff writes poems on the backs of take out receipts and on yellow sticky notes, just like Jeff used to do. She finds them in odd places, as if Little Jeff doesn't understand that it might be more romantic to put them on her side of the bed or on her nightstand. She finds a haiku-freezer door left open / letting out the stark cold air / I am apology-taped to a box of her tampons, then free verse tucked into the toes of her galoshes. The poems aren't good exactly, but she takes them from their hiding places and puts them in the sc.r.a.pbook where she kept Jeff's poems, then, unsure if she should treat them as two separate authors, she removes them and starts a new collection. These new poems are written by someone who is like Jeff but is not him, unless she counts the leavings of a body as part of a person. Unless she counts the dead skin cells ground into her carpet or the sweat soaked permanently into the mattress, the one lone hair stuck in the drain of their shower because she is too lazy to dislodge it. She could count these things as Jeff but doesn't, and if these things are not Jeff, then neither is this other person.

The first time she has s.e.x with Little Jeff is the best s.e.x she's had in a year. What Little Jeff knows about her is what Jeff used to know, back when he cared more about her happiness than his own. Afterward, with Little Jeff curled against her longer body, she recognizes this is unfair, but she thinks it again anyway. She has always wondered why her friends are constantly falling into bed with their ex-boyfriends and now she understands. It is good to be known, to have your likes and dislikes already clear before the act even begins.

Three months after Jeff moves out, Allison is still learning to take the good with the bad, to put up with the boogers stuck to her furniture if it means she gets poems tucked in her purse. She hates that Little Jeff smokes so much, but she doesn't ask him to quit. She doesn't ask him to change anything, at first because she doesn't want to drive him away and then later because she is afraid of what will happen to whatever he quits.

Whatever she and Little Jeff have, it may end one day, and then what? What if another, smaller version comes to live with her?

This time, she'll let her man do whatever he wants, be whoever he needs to be, and she'll decide whether to stay or go based on who he is, not who she wants him to be.

Together, they go to other places that Jeff and Allison went when they were new. They go to an art museum that Allison has wanted to see forever, and they go to a movie that Little Jeff picks out of the paper, some remake of an eighties cartoon that Allison never watched and still doesn't like. They go to the botanical gardens, a place people only go when they start dating or when they get married or when they are a thousand years old. Allison is glad that Little Jeff has so much facial hair or else she would have to worry that people would think she was letting her kid smoke. As it is, they hold hands and kiss and she learns to stop caring what other people think they see. She has often made choices because someone else told her she should, because she read about a new diet in a magazine or because her friends were all doing the same. Little Jeff is everything she took from Jeff by doing this, and it's enough for her to see she doesn't want to be that way ever again.

One day, Allison comes home from work with an armload of groceries, thrilled at the truly decadent meal she's making for the two of them for dinner. Nowhere in her bags is any organic fruit or wheatgra.s.s or any labels with the words high-fiber on them. Instead, she's cooking footlong coney dogs, with chili out of a can and onions out of a plastic bag. She's frying French fries and making root beer floats. She knows eating this is going to make her sick, but she also knows it's going to make Little Jeff happy.

She sits her groceries down on the counter and calls for him but there's no answer. It takes her a minute to realize that the television is dark, that it isn't tuned to sports news or the endless reruns of crime procedural shows that always seem to be on. Walking through the apartment, she notices other things: There are no clothes on the floor of the bathroom, no wads of tissue crumpled along Little Jeff's side of the bed.

She's nearly in a panic trying to find him, but eventually she does. He's outside on the apartment's small balcony, somewhere she's never seen him go before. There isn't any furniture out there, so he's sitting on the concrete.

It takes her a minute to realize he's crying. In the years she was with the real Jeff, she never saw him cry, and so Allison doesn't know what to do. She reaches in her purse and offers Little Jeff a cigarette from the pack she purchased herself a few days ago, after convincing herself that she'd been quit long enough that it was okay to have just one. Little Jeff shakes his head, his eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g, and it's only then that Allison realizes what seemed different about the apartment. It hadn't smelled like smoke when she came in.

Little Jeff's quit smoking.

She drops her purse and scoops him up in her arms, and as he curls against her she can feel he's lost weight, and although it takes a little longer to be sure, she sees he's lost height too, that he is even smaller than he was before. Even his facial hair is thinning, fading from a full goatee to a tiny triangle of soul patch.

Allison is furious, but not at Little Jeff, who she keeps rocking and rea.s.suring that everything will be okay, even though she's sure that it won't be, that if she doesn't do something then he'll be gone soon.

She needs to call Jeff. Needs to tell him not to stop quitting everything she made him quit, because she's sure that's what's happened.

She wants a cigarette, craves it intensely, but she fights the urge. It's taken her months, but she's finally realizing that Little Jeff might not be the only thing leftover from the breakup.

Little Jeff falls asleep alone that night, pushed all the way over on his side of the bed, as if he recognizes that his diminishing size has changed the physical dynamic between them. He's child-like in a way he wasn't only a day before, and the idea of him as a lover is past. Allison lies awake, staring at him and wondering what her own counterpart might look like. She tries to remember all she quit while Jeff and she dated. Smoking is a given, but other things are vaguer. Which of Allison's haircuts would her leftover sport? She flips through the mental images she has of herself, eventually settling on the long perm she'd had when they started dating. Jeff had liked it, but had encouraged her to try something new, something more contemporary.

What else? Allison thinks about her job at the textbook publisher, about how she hates it but has never looked for anything else. She thinks about all the careers she wanted instead, and wonders if they count as things that she quit or if they were never what she actually was. She had wanted to be a gymnast as a little girl, and then an astronaut. She had played the flute in junior high, but gave it up in high school to try to date a different cla.s.s of boy than what she found in the band. She owns a bike she never uses. Ditto rollerblades. Ditto yoga videos.

This Little Allison, she might wear hideous blue eyeliner or have terribly outdated tastes in clothing, but Allison doesn't really think that's all of it.

Most of what Allison has quit are good things, things that might have made her happier than she is. She doesn't have bad habits, just bad follow-through.

Little Jeff is snoring quietly, his tiny hands folded over his belly. She wonders if she is supposed to stop Jeff from starting up all his old bad habits, or if she is supposed to encourage him until this other vanishes completely.

Watching Little Jeff sleep, she wonders if he's dreaming. If he dreams. She wonders if it hurt when he shrank, or if it was just something that happened. She wishes he could talk so he could tell her what he wanted her to do.

She gets out of bed and reaches for her phone. Dials Jeff's cell. It rings and rings and then, right before the voicemail should click on, he answers, his voice groggy with sleep.

He says, h.e.l.lo? Allison?

She hangs up by slamming the clamsh.e.l.l shut, then turns the phone off so he can't call her back. She sits in the dark with the phone clenched between her hands until she's sure of what she wants to do, and then she gets up and does it. Gets dressed. Puts her shoes on. Goes downstairs to the parking lot and moves her car close to the front of the building, then goes back upstairs with the engine running.

Quietly, Allison wraps the sleeping boy in his blanket and carries him down to the car. He's so small. She wishes she had a car seat for him but she doesn't. She'll have to be careful. He stirs when she buckles him in but doesn't wake up, only sticks his thumb in his mouth and sucks hard. She gets in the driver's seat and just drives.

At Jeff's new place, Allison peeks in the bedroom window, her toes digging into the soft dirt around his bushes. It takes a minute for her eyes to adjust, but thankfully Jeff's sleeping with his television on, something she never would have let him do.

Not that she cares. She doesn't, for real this time, and anyway she's not there to see Jeff, or at least not just Jeff. She's there to see if she's there too.

And she is.

There, like a doll tucked into Jeff's arms, is a tiny version of her, complete with the long hair Allison predicted. On the nightstand are the bulky red gla.s.ses she got rid of in college, folded neatly beside a gla.s.s of water. It's all she can see from the bushes, but it's enough.

The only other thing she sees-the very last detail before she turns away from the window-is how happy they both look. How contented. How like a father and a daughter.

She wants to look like that too. Wants to look like that with them. Wants to look like a family, with him and him and her.

She wants to stop quitting and then unquitting. She wants to stop hurting people by doing one or the other. She wants to stick with something and make it work this time, no matter what.

Allison doesn't know what will happen when Jeff meets Little Jeff, or when she meets Little Allison, but that doesn't matter. She's tired of all the warnings, all the shows and magazines and well-intentioned friends telling her it's too risky to do this thing or that thing. All the voices telling her she can't do what she wants.

She walks back to her car and opens the pa.s.senger door, then crouches down and carefully unbuckles the sleeping boy. Little Jeff slings his arms around her neck like the toddler he's becoming, and she lifts him with an arm tucked under his hips. Even in the dim glow of the dome light she can see how young he looks. His facial hair is completely gone, and he's even a little pudgy, a little fat in the cheeks. Allison kisses him on his forehead, then carries him up the walk toward Jeff's front door. She doesn't know what any of this is or what it might mean, but she's willing to try anyway, to trust that together they can make it work.

She reaches for the doorbell. She rings it. She thinks of what to say, of the dozens of ways she might say what she needs to. She settles on one, and when the door opens she says it as fast as she can, trying to make a million new promises all at once.