Our Taxonomy
2,152 words
Smelled like a big fog.
Thats what I thought. The collected smells of London. The shirt she sent was cold and damp and thats how I imagined London, it fit, even though it had been in transit long enough that all this was really probably very just in my head.
She calls me at seven. Ive got my hand in a popcorn bowl and I get salt, yellow like sand, on the phone. I promise myself that I will not eat this tomorrow. Tomorrow, I eat this.
On the phone, I say yes to her questions, I say many comforting things. She is upset with her school and thinks I dont understand. I dont understand. I only thank her for the shirt she sent, hoping that covers up the grotesque disconnect; I tell her about the coolness it brought, the fog, the London funk. She said she felt that when she sent it, too. She said she felt wrapped in it almost every day now.
She wears a jacket I bought her when she goes out to pubs with her friends. These events exist only in anecdote, so their brevity here is functional: she condenses them to snippets, I condense them further. Boys. Girls. Someone she likes, someone she doesnt. Someone who is trying to help her and someone out to get her. I remember the politics of socialization but only in theory. All I really see when she paints a picture of these nights is her, in the jacket, beautiful. I sit in sweatpants, ones I cut off at the knees. We hang up and I wipe my hands on a paper towel and throw it in the trash. There are four others just like it, stained yellow.
I write her a letter. I tell her about how I feel about kids. A little girl comes to the place where I work, asks me questions like a friend, like a dad, and is the thing most wanted. She is four. She carries a jacket over her shoulder and is flocked at the edges with frills and curiosity. I show her how the thermometer works and she smiles, big, a smile that breaks free of her face and washes over the room. Grandma and Grandpa in the corner are smiling, and I am too. She has the sniffles. A shot is ordered, and I administer it. I kneel down by her on the floorduck down into her part of the world, a perspective I envyand hold the tiny tan arm still. The needle slides in gently at an angle, the skin so tight it seems to me like a balloon waiting to pop. She winces a wince that is not fear, but the wince of someone who knows theyre supposed to be wincing. When the needle is out and I say okay, all done, shes already smiling again. She hugs my neck and whispers thank you. Her breath smells like chocolate and coconut. When Im alone thats the smell I think about: the smell that comes to me when I try to remember sometimes Im useful, that Im worth a little but maybe not a lot.
Worth not much is still worth a little. These are the thoughts you keep.
My girl, the one in England who I love, who I cant touch, she likes birds. She collects moments and draws her pictures with words. Her papaw hit an owl with his car when she was little. She carried it off the road and watched it die. She tells me, the head, Greg, it was spun all the way backward! Just like they say. The eyes were looking up at the sky, going somewhere, and something in its throat gurgled to escape. Parts of its body had been squeeze to the tip, bloody blisters bursting. Can you imagine? This, she said, was the turning point. She liked everything a little less, sometimes obviously, sometimes imperceptibly, but always less. She was five or eight or ten or somewhere betweenthis time for her was blur.
When she could touch my arm shed do so and point to a bird that flew to a tree, jerked its head side-to-side. Her field guide tells us taxonomy, but its the funnyparts I remember: the bird that looks like it has a tomahawk for a head, the bird whose beak looks like puckered lips waiting for a kiss. When I tell her this, she gives me a kiss, and I want birds that look like interlaced fingers.
My Papaw did this too, but did it from his favorite oblong window, on a couch that faced opposite it, peering out with his feet pulled up behind him and a pair of binoculars on his eyes. He kept two wooden houses he built on six foot metal poles stocked with black sunflower seeds. This, he said, was what they really liked, and perceived his success at drawing locals to dine while the neighbors birdhouses sat empty to be largely attributable to his far superior understanding of avian gastronomy. He said this in fewer words. He was a fewer words man. He named the birds the way I do, named them by what they did: mudsuckers dipped down and sipped at puddles, causing little ripples to emanate out, lifting their head and looking left, right, middle, right, left, to be sure they werent being watched. Butterballs were fat little birds who muscled the others in his houses to the side. They were first to arrive, last to leave. Thrushthroats had a big red stripe that ran from just under their beak to their breast and spread. He sat with the binoculars pressed to his eyes, smiling. This lent him the air of a guerrilla warrior with the most amiable of goals: the birds would be watched, whether they liked it or not.
Another war was taking place between he and the local squirrels, who fought to ascend the six foot metal poles and maneuver the bottom of the birdhouses, designed with a circular plate to keep them from engaging in a daily petty larceny, here a seed, there a seed, everywhere a seed seed. My little brother and I wanted to help. We found acorns littered all over the driveway, grass, amidst crunchy falls leaves, discarded by the trees or squirrels or both. We pick them up and throw them back to the treelimbs, to the squirrels, who we figured would get the message. So many acorns and these squirrels wanted seed. Ill have what theyre having, they say, but natures prix fixe menu notes that there are rarely substitutions. We crush an acorn with a rock, and split it. It dawns on us then why the war between bird and squirrel rages on, and always will. Little brother spits and laughs, and we are both laughing, in hysterics. His teeth are gapped and I can see his pink tongue through them pulsing while he yuks. Theyll always be gapped, standing in for all the things I love in him, all the things that are frustrating about him. He is reckless and laissez-fare in a way I can never be, draws trouble to his chest. He is always laughing, and so he always wins.
Far away now. Papaw, who is dead. Little brother who is in care of the state, speaks to me with gapped teeth through glass, who cannot come home. Girl who touched my arm now a thousand miles away, I think. Or maybe two thousand. Distance and direction and time are not my strongsuits. I reach for a pencil on the desk and I spill my coffee. Once is excusable. Three times this week, and I call my doctor.
My hands shake when I try to hold something very still. You keep moving because then its something you choose.
I live by myself and I watch birds now too. I do it for my own reasons. I guess everybody does. I do it to know that there are birds. To know that lifes cycles go on. This makes my fears seem small. I will die and I will rot and a smell will rise from the earth where I lay, but that funk will be gone soon, and birds will still sing and eat black seeds and squirrels will covet. These battles are beyond me. I am a spectator with only one ticket.
I robe myself in the smell of London, slim to my chest with the top button loose. I put on a tie and I meet my friends for dinner. I love my friends. I dont get enough of them. I lived with one for a time and we got along swell. Our house was full of stray popcorn kernels and a constant whir of popcorn being made. We would rearrange furniture and find a kernel here, a kernel there, like we ran a movie theater. Is this not a jovial place? I remember it fondly. The girl I love is suspicious of him. He had a night with a friend of hers after some drinks, and it didnt go the way that friend of hers wanted it to after that, he now out of love with the moment even as it persisted for her. Who do you blame here? I see his heart and I see its a good heart. Its a heart even I envy. I know my heart is not so good. To hear her denounce it is a denouncement of my heart, of all lesser hearts like mine. I dont think shes wrong to feel sore about it for her friends, but only the two of them know what was said or done then. All thats left for me is the sweet, idle chit-chat we exchange while I gather my breakfast and he washes sheets in the morning.
This is how I see it, but I am afraid to tell her so. It seems fundamental. It seems like a point of view she could not forgive. We could talk about it, disagree, forgive. But the smell of suspicion hangs over me, my condoning, and it lives on as a wedge that drops between us. With no hand on my arm these wedges are amplified, the chasm widens gradually. Sweet fruit does not rot instantlythere is a gradual turn from sugary edible nutrition to the foul stenched blob you toss in the trash at arms length. But it always seems instant, because you forget these things and find them one day in the fridge. Maybe thats it. I am something stored, and maybe, arms length, her voice says, how did I forget this was in there?
I squeeze this fruit. I cradle the phone.
I tell her I love her more than anything, and she says shes frustrated, overwhelmed. I wore your shirt tonight, I say. Really? she asks, and there is a smile that she tacks to the end of this word. I draw a laugh out of her with a story some days and I think I may be able to keep her with them. But I know deep down a laugh is a laugh is a laugh. Hell, I laugh at a dog biting its own ass on the carpet. She tacks subtle emotion on the tips of her words and rarely shows me all the cards. I tell her Im sick of my hair and I want it shaved. I want to feel the air on it again. I want to hear approval in her oh, I want to hear scolding, but the indifference is intolerable.
My papaw taught me to draw water from my ear by lying on hot concrete after I swam. I lay there with my head to the ground as if I tracked something, in fact hearing nothing. The water starts to rumble as it rolls, and then it is just a warm trickle down your lobe that seeps into a dark spot on the pavement. It feels so big in your head, that water, but out in the world its just a dark spot, one the size of a dime, and the sounds of splashes and Papaw belching and slamming doors with a backward kick of the foot return to full vividness.
That little dime can kill you thoughif it stays inside it gives birth to infection and sepsis.
I tell myself to call her tomorrow and to have something interesting to say. To have done something that will make her wish she were there. Maybe I should go see my brother, if I can keep my hands still enough to drive. I miss his voice, his smile, his gapped teeth, his laughing. Even through the phone and glass he cannot stop laughing. But the hands are the real question--that's the variable I have to consider.
I take her shirt off my body. Its warm now. Thats nicer, I guess. I press it to my face and smell. The smell of the city, so prominent once, is fainter, almost gone, and I miss it.
