They Dragged Them through the Streets: A Novel

F

13 F The night after Z died we sat in A’s living room. I’d done this kind of sitting before and A was looking to me for something. There’s no skill to it really, I wanted to say, but by then she was crying again. Straightening the magazines on the table , cleaning pointlessly. Vivienne and Sara should have been there hours before. I rolled a joint and went outside to smoke it. A shook her head at me, she started to fight: if the police come, she meant. I walked out to the yard, to where skunks lingered, raccoons eyeing the compost. She stayed inside, watching for headlights. For months afterward we thought Vivienne would have one of her breakdowns, but she didn’t. I’ve never understood this. It would be easier, I thought—just disappear into whatever it is, stay in bed, check in to some place, go. She didn’t. I thought Vivienne’s grief would make her even more of a queen but it didn’t. She shrank. At A’s house she washed the dishes, and not in the old way, where you’d find one dirty glass head-down among the clean, like a sign. 14 Without Z, two bottles of wine was just enough. This was a new fact. I grew tired of watching A watch Vivienne. I got drunker. Come on a walk, I said to A, putting a beer in my pocket and thinking of that stone by the stream in the dark. Come to this meeting, she said. She was writing a pamphlet. Pointless, I said. I’ll see you in an hour, she said, that’s how long the walk took if you smoked slowly. Just for that reason I’d come back another way, starting on what looked like a deer path but wasn’t, took its toll in jacket, skin. One long welt across my eyebrow that A laughed at then cleaned. I would have avoided the nettles, I said, but it was dark. And it’s not true, I wouldn’t have avoided them. Down along the power lines was the thickest stretch. Back behind the church, the community center. You could find a tent or two here in the summer, a good spot for the homeless. Old fire rings here and there as if the men sat and drank together. Under the hemlocks nearby, the shrubs had been flattened by deer bedding down. As if they too had come for the fire, the company. I came out by the church, I went home. A would have finished whatever piece she was writing and left a draft for me on the table. She’d rig the house like this, so that you’d go to pet the dog and start reading again about the latest development, that gold-domed mosque. No point, I said, when she brought up the meeting again. But as she cleaned the nettle stings I told her about a boy: in the hospital after an explosion he was in the same room as his parents , but they left without claiming him, still showing everyone the pictures, he no longer looked enough like himself. 15 You could have been a doctor, she said to me, plenty of times. I could have. But I had my reasons. • I had my reasons, I think this now: I go to the lab, I come home. I had my reasons, I want to say to the protesters. Every few months they gather outside the lab again, spend a few days shouting, waving posters of rabbits and monkeys. But every day there’s fresh food and water, I want to tell them, the whole place smells like fresh cedar. It’s someone’s job just to come in and change the bedding cage by cage. The mice caged together—I want to say this to them—never fight, and they sleep piled up warmly, you have to lift them away from the softness of each other. I don’t know what they know of the loss of each other. I don’t mind the scratching, their claws in my palm. I think it’s something the body knows, that feel of feet and whiskers arriving just before death, I think it could be a comfort. When I stole from the lab in those days I felt the animals watching me: watching me doctor...