Family Lore
They were just two lucky people, in the eighth year of their marriage, living in a high-rise in a Texas city that no one back home knew anything about, and they were being discharged from the hospital that afternoon in possession of a six-pound-eleven-ounce baby girl, who had been delivered three weeks early, and of whom they were both terrified.
The C-section had been in the cards since their twenty-four-week appointment, but the preeclampsia had been a surprise—or a surprise to him, at least. His wife had been insisting for months that she knew, that she felt, something was going to go sideways. She was full of such premonitions. The worst thing about them was that she only ever remembered the ones that bore out, and failed to recall the significantly more numerous ones that did not. An hour or so before the C-section, in a lull between visits from the surgical team, she’d had another one. She had grabbed his arm and said, “Something bad is going to happen.”
For a moment, he’d believed her. He had never seen her so afraid. But his job was to keep the world at bay. “Nothing bad will happen,” he said. “I promise. Everything’s gonna be O.K.” He outlined all the things she had done right: quit drinking, eaten healthily, taken her prenatals and her low-dose aspirin, gone on long walks with the dog, and so on.
His reassurance seemed to work its usual magic. She wiped the tears from her face and began making small talk with the head nurse, who was palpating her pale, swollen arms in search of a vein.
“How long have you two been married?” the nurse wanted to know.
“Eight years,” his wife said. She pointed to the dome of her belly under the hospital gown. “We finally had sex.”
The nurse’s laughter was sincere, and he could tell his wife knew it. She sat there, pleased with herself, smiling for the first time since the doctor had sent them down to triage for blood-pressure monitoring. But then followed forty-seven minutes during which he was certain that something bad would happen—and perhaps already had. From his perch on the small stool beside the machine that periodically slurped his wife’s blood out of her body, he watched the gleaming faces of the doctors, with the red of his wife’s insides reflected in their goggles, and thought, Here it comes, the bad thing.
But he was wrong. The baby was pulled out, screaming but healthy. His wife was sewn back together and wheeled to her room. Her vitals and her blood-soaked pad were checked, then checked again. The flurry of people around her began to subside. The lactation consultant came in and explained the mechanics of the hospital breast pump. The night nurse took over and taught him how to swaddle the baby, whose name was written on the dry-erase board across from the bed.
And now here they were, three days later, and the only bad thing that had happened so far was that he couldn’t find the hat that went with the baby’s going-home outfit, a red onesie dotted with orange seeds that was meant to make her look like a tomato. The hat was green, and it represented the vine. They had bought the outfit months ago, despite themselves, when they were just beginning to believe that this baby might, in fact, stick around.
He searched for the hat while his wife staggered to the bathroom one last time. He could’ve sworn he’d brought it with him when he grabbed the go bag, had a clear memory of stuffing it into the front pocket.
His wife returned, bracing herself along the wall. “Any luck?”
He shook his head. “I must’ve left it at home.”
“Are you sure? I thought I saw it.”
“So did I, but it isn’t here.”
“We have to find it.” There was a tremor in her voice. “We can’t leave it here all alone.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, feeling the immensity of this fuckup. “It’s at home.”
He checked under the hospital bed again, so that she would see him doing it, and then started to dress the baby in the tomato part of the outfit. While he tried to pluck their daughter’s tiny hands through the sleeves, his wife went around the room picking up everything that wasn’t nailed down: the diapers and creams that the nurses had insisted were free, the enormous bladder pads from the bathroom, the unopened grippy socks, the compression stockings, and even the box of tissues, or what was left of it after three days of her trying to get her milk to come in early. “Hon,” he said, finding a teaspoon from the hospital kitchen in her pocket as he went to drape her jacket over the wheelchair handles. “Why?”
She burst into tears. “I don’t know,” she said. “To protect the baby.”
She tried to explain this better in the car as he crawled home along the back roads. “I had such an awful feeling before, and we got so lucky and everyone made it out O.K. and the milk finally came in, and I don’t know which of the things in the room was the one that made it happen, you know?”
He didn’t know, wasn’t like that, didn’t imbue Kleenex and ketchup packets with apotropaic powers.
“You made it happen,” he said. “You did.”
At home, they changed the baby, put her in the bassinet on the wife’s side of the bed, and counted her breaths together. She lay groaning in half sleep, dressed in the “AMERICAN BY BIRTH, TEXAN BY THE GRACE OF GOD” onesie they had bought to troll their parents.
While his wife stepped carefully into her pajama bottoms, he hunted around for the hat. It wasn’t where he’d thought it would be, in the pile of baby clothes, tags still on, that had been growing on the nursery chair. It wasn’t in the chest of drawers, either, or trapped in one of the dryer fins. He was a calm person, but he felt acutely the passing of each precarious second, as he waited for the baby to stir, to go from silence to noise, afraid of what she might need or do, of the possibility that the next waking would be the one that would render them helpless.
“Any sign of the hat?” his wife called.
He lied. “Yes,” he said.
“Oh, thank God.”
“It fell behind the coatrack. I’ll just put it in the wash.”
He ran a deceitful load of laundry, then went into the bathroom, turned on the tub to mask the sound of his voice, and called Labor and Delivery. By this point, he knew the number by heart. The nurse they affectionately called Longshanks, the one who had walked them to the car, answered. “Oh, hi,” she said. “Is everything O.K.?”
“Yes,” he whispered. “But I think we left the baby’s hat there. Not the hospital hat, the one that we brought with us. It looks like a green stem. For a tomato.”
“Oh, no,” Nurse Longshanks said. “I’ll go check.”
His wife knocked on the bathroom door. He hung up hurriedly. The baby had pooped again, and this had to be noted in the makeshift spreadsheet he had started, freehand, on printer paper back at the hospital. He splashed water on his face and went out to update the input-output log.
When their friends brought the dog back, there was a brief scuffle over the new gate that had been set up to keep him out of the bedroom. It didn’t take the dog long to accept his exile, and he stood staring at the mysterious and fragrant bundle in the bassinet, with his big, curl-laden spaniel ears hanging ruefully over the gate.
When the wife went in to wake the baby for another feeding, the husband opened the sliding door and followed the dog out onto the balcony. It was a glorious late-October afternoon. The sun lolled drunkenly in the glazed windows of the half-built office building across the street. He could smell the smoke from the nearby barbecue joint. He had been planning to cook that night, but maybe takeout was the way to go. Didn’t they deserve a bit of indulgence, all of them, even the dog, who was tolerating this disruption rather well?
He was mentally assembling a three-meat platter when he looked down and noticed that the dog was on top of something. At first, he mistook it for some old leather chew toy. But, when it moved, he realized that it was a bat.
“Jesus,” he said, hooking the dog with his leg. “Leave it, leave it!”
The bat was lying on its back. The husband had never seen one up close before. It was bigger than he would have guessed, with a piggy, snub-nosed face and a scrawny tail and legs lying flat behind it, making it look as though its back was broken. The wings were awkward and ugly, tipped with crooked, writhing little hands, the outstretched skin loose and shivering between its fingers. The screeching he’d taken for some distant mechanical failure was actually emanating from the bat.
“Hello?” Somewhere behind him, his wife was calling his name. He looked over his shoulder. She was standing in the kitchen with the baby in her arms. “What should we do for dinner?”
“Barbecue?” he said.
When she turned to take the Frankie’s Pit flyer off the fridge, he nudged the bat to the edge of the balcony with his sneaker and pushed it over the side. It landed on the balcony below, where it continued to twitch, in what he queasily assumed were its death throes.
The dog keened after it for a while, then came inside. They ordered barbecue and tried to eat it. The baby woke, nursed, slept, and woke again. They opened a fresh box of diapers, undressed the baby together on the changing mat, and wrapped a conga line of Piglets around her tiny waist, doing their best to avoid the terrifying, necrotic plug that would, in ten to fourteen days, fall off and reveal her belly button.
His wife attempted a nap, but every time he passed by the bedroom door he could see her peering into the bassinet, and then it was time to wake the baby for another feeding. After that, miraculously, they fell asleep, the wife and the baby, and he was alone. The sun had set. He washed the pump parts and got the pumping station ready for later, then sat down for the first time in the new strangeness of their apartment. An odd, dense unknowing seemed to have followed him home from the hospital. He felt separated from language, from thought.
The dog came over and nudged his hand. Other spaniels had noble lineages and gentle dispositions. Theirs was a beautiful idiot. Neurotic and entirely without manners. Prone to despair-inducing bouts of obstinacy.
He was scratching the dog’s ears when the thought came to him. Rabies. Bats carried rabies. Why hadn’t he remembered this? Warnings were posted everywhere in their neighborhood, which was named for the bridge that housed the city’s bat colony. Hadn’t he stood on that bridge, on their first night in town, shoulder to shoulder with all the teetering bachelorettes and Midwestern grad dads, to watch the column of clicking bodies course out into the night sky?
He stared down at the dog. “Did you touch it?”
The dog went on looking at him with his faintly smiling spaniel face.
The husband washed his hands and called Animal Control. It took a while to find the number because apparently the department’s official name was Animal Protection. While he was waiting for his call to be answered in the order in which it had been received, he went out onto the balcony and looked over the railing. The bat was still down there. Even in the dark, he could tell that it was moving. Writhing on the Western-themed outdoor rug of whoever lived below them.
When the hold music cut out abruptly and a woman’s voice said, “Animal Protection, can I help you?,” every thought left his head. He stepped back inside and sat down on the plush little love seat that served as their reading nook. He needed to be able to see the bedroom door, so that he could hang up if the handle dipped to signal his wife’s emergence.
“Hello?”
“Yes. Yes, hi, I’m wondering what the procedure is for when a bat has interacted with your dog.”
“What do you mean by ‘interacted’?”
“I don’t know.”
The woman on the line took a deep breath. “Sir, did your dog get hold of a bat?”
“No,” he said. “Not exactly.”
“Please tell me what happened.”
“I came out on the balcony and found him standing over it.”
“Was it in his mouth?”
“No—it was sort of skittering around on the floor at his feet.”
“I see.” He could hear her typing. “Did your dog make contact with the bat?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Are you certain?”
“No. I guess he could have. He was just sort of standing there, looking at it.” More typing. Why? He felt a sudden need to distance himself from the situation. “Anyway. He’s not my dog. I’m watching him for a friend.”
“I see. I need you to understand, sir: bat bites are very serious.”
“I know,” he said.
“One per cent of the bats in our area carry rabies. That may not sound like a lot to you, sir, but, in a colony of one and a half million, that’s fifteen thousand bats. So, when you can’t be completely certain that no contact occurred, we have to proceed as though contact did occur.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, assuming your dog has been vaccinated against rabies—”
“He’s not my dog.”
“—he will have to receive a booster as soon as possible, and then be quarantined in the home.”
“Quarantined?”
“Yes. For a minimum of forty-five days. Unless you’re still in possession of the bat.”
“Oh!” he said. “I am.”
He got up and headed for the balcony.
“In that case, we can collect the bat and test it. If it tests negative for rabies, the quarantine will be lifted.”
“That’s good! That’s good. Do I put it in a Tupperware or something?”
He looked over the railing. The balcony below was now empty.
“No,” the woman was saying. “Don’t touch the bat, sir. I’ll send an agent over to pick it up. Let’s start with your address. Where do you live?”
He started to tell her, then he hung up. His wife had emerged and was moving through the apartment with the room thermometer held out in front of her like a divining rod. She was trying to locate a good spot for the living-room bassinet, somewhere that registered the recommended seventy degrees. She seemed almost blissful. She noticed him looking at her and waved. For a moment, she was herself again—not worry-free, she had never been that, but free of the pulverizing new weight of imagining the baby’s demise. He could picture the arrival of the Animal Protection agent, some loud, careless government drone in huge boots who would inevitably pet the baby’s head, cleaving into his wife’s hard-won moment of peace. He couldn’t do that to her. And, anyway, he didn’t have the bat. It must have crawled to the edge of the balcony below and fallen off. He would try Animal Protection again when he found it.
He made the excuse of taking the dog outside, and went down to the fifth floor, where the twin behemoths of the gym and the pool deck blasted their relentless lights toward each other across a fake-grass bocce court. He tied the dog up, let himself through the security gate, and looked up. The balcony onto which the bat had fallen jutted out fourteen feet above him. If the bat had somehow crawled over the edge, it would have landed in the topiaries that separated the gym windows from the bocce court.
He looked around. The place was empty, as usual. People didn’t come to this pool to swim on quiet, beautiful nights, as he and his wife did. The other residents only ever used it when a booze-sponsored summer bash brought some Instagram-famous d.j. to the building.
He hopped the little fence and shouldered in among the topiaries. They were thornier than they looked and snagged his clothes as he crouched down to swing his phone flashlight over the mulch around the roots. The search yielded a pineapple-flavored vape pen and a pair of Chanel sunglasses, but no bat. He straightened up to find a woman in matching lavender workout clothes staring through the gym window at him from one of the ellipticals. He waved stupidly, pointed at the ground, pointed to his phone, mimed laughter, and waved again. Then he stumbled back out to where the dog was standing on his hind legs, looking mistrustfully over the fence at him.
Upstairs, the situation with the baby had devolved. Mother and child were sitting up in bed, stripped down to their respective diapers. Apparently, the baby had treated her mother to what had at first seemed like a smile, but instead turned out to be a prelude to the biggest blowout she’d had to date. He threw the soiled linens into the washing machine, cleaned up the baby, then held the strange, weightless furnace of her tiny body in the crook of his arm while he helped his wife climb into the shower.
“Remember,” he said, “don’t use any soap on the incision. Just let the water run over it.”
“O.K.,” she said.
“Take your time.”
He could tell that she was trying not to cry. How was he supposed to tell her about the bat without sending her into a tailspin? Imagine bringing up rabies to somebody who had just been bisected and then stuck back together with what, at least to him, looked like packing tape?
Once his wife was finally settled—cleanly outfitted, the backs of her earrings jammed tightly into her earlobes so that they wouldn’t dislodge and fall into the baby’s open mouth—he lay down on the couch with the spare pillow and blanket and looked at the dog, who had clambered dejectedly into his usual spot, on the armchair he had destroyed in puppyhood.
The husband opened his phone and thumbed “What is rabies?” into the search bar. Throughout much of the world, it turned out, rabies was a death sentence. An ancient, slow-moving, and catastrophically dangerous virus transferred from mammal to mammal through the saliva of the infected. He was unnerved to learn that the incubation period could be as long as three months. Fatal, the internet kept saying. Once symptoms began, the disease was almost always fatal. Comment sections were filled with glib condemnations of relatives who had behaved idiotically after exposure.
On the subject of boosters, the internet said, the sooner the better. But the vet clinic was on the other side of town. He couldn’t just swing by. He would have to detour there during a grocery run, or some other plausibly lengthy errand. And, even if he could pull this off without alerting his wife, there was the matter of the dog’s sedatives. The dog was an absolute demon at the vet. Dr. Hottie, as his wife had dubbed the handsome veterinarian when she first saw him, had prescribed a mandatory “chill protocol” of several pills before all visits. Without them, the dog would start shaking in the passenger seat the second you took the exit toward the clinic. If, by some miracle, you managed to get him into the building, after wrangling him out of the car in that nightmare of a parking lot with a blind curve that yawned out onto the road, he would hurl himself repeatedly against the waiting-room door, making a spectacle of himself in front of everybody else’s mortified pets, until it was time to head to the exam area, where he would show his teeth and try for anyone who attempted to touch him (including, or perhaps especially, the husband himself).
No, the thing couldn’t be done without pills, but his wife was their usual administrator, and, when the husband checked the labels on the pill bottles, he found that they were so faded he couldn’t make out the prescribed dosage at all.
It would be so much easier if he could just get hold of the bat.
Maybe it hadn’t fallen off the balcony at all. Maybe the downstairs neighbor had noticed it and put it in a shoebox, not realizing that you weren’t supposed to do something like that. Tomorrow, first chance he got, he would go downstairs and ask.
He tried to sleep, but instead found himself studying anatomical drawings of the canine nervous system. He watched a video of a rabid dog convulsing in stark-ribbed agony. Then one of an infected man becoming unmade, wild-eyed, roaring in pain. Furious rabies, the captions said. Fatal.
At first light, he tried Labor and Delivery again.
“No sign yet,” Nurse Longshanks said. “Here’s my theory. Your hat probably got sent to the cleaners with all the other linens.”
“Oh, no,” he said. “That green’ll destroy everything around it.”
“That’s all right. Worse things happen to our sheets, believe me.” She paused. “How’s the little one? You getting any sleep?”
He lied and said that he was. It occurred to him, after he hung up, that the hat might not make it back to them after all. Its disappearance had opened something, some emotional clause, and he might need to close it himself by ordering a duplicate. But they had bought the original outfit in a wildly expensive boutique in Petaluma, and all the searches for “baby hat tomato stem” produced ugly, coarse Amazon dupes that wouldn’t fool his wife. He ordered one anyway, just in case, but it only made him feel worse.
While his wife was doing the morning feeding, he took the dog downstairs and knocked. The door swung open, and there, to his horror, stood Baby Jane.
He let go of the leash immediately and felt the dog take off in the direction of the elevator. Thankfully, Baby Jane didn’t seem to notice. Her wild white hair was up in a listing bun. Her makeup was almost done: the black eyebrows were drawn on, and she had gone around her lips with what must have been a blunt pencil, but two globs of concealer sat unblended at the corners of her eyes.
The husband hadn’t realized that she was their downstairs neighbor. He hadn’t said a word to her since their now infamous exchange in the lobby that spring, when the dog had sniffed her in passing while she was berating the concierge, and she, only half turning, had hoofed the dog right in the ribs with the heel of her turquoise-studded boot. The husband had witnessed this from about ten yards away, his dog and wife having gone ahead of him, so it was the wife who had surged back and grabbed a fistful of Baby Jane’s hair. Baby Jane had grabbed back. The two of them had been locked together, all elbows and teeth, frothing expletives into each other’s faces. By the time the baffled concierge stood up, the husband had already crossed the lobby and seized a couple of the clenched hands—he wasn’t even sure whose. He was shouting, “Take it easy, Baby Jane!,” as he tried to yank his wife free.
Because both parties received only a verbal warning once police arrived, he never got her real name. Ever since, though, even residents who hadn’t witnessed the incident had been calling her Baby Jane behind her back.
“You’re early,” she said, unfathomably failing to recognize him.
“I’m sorry.”
Under normal circumstances, he would have resisted being dragged into her apartment, but he wanted her to remain oblivious to the dog in the hallway. Save for the light-killing velvet drapes that hung from every window, her place was laid out exactly like his own. He bumped into one crate and then another on his way to the middle of the room, where an enormous desk that looked like the prow of a ship supported the kind of Tomorrowland-era computer he hadn’t seen since childhood. Baby Jane took a seat at the keyboard and gestured for him to choose between two mismatched armchairs. He perched on the armrest of the green velvet one, ready to sprint for the door the moment she realized who he was.
Baby Jane said, “Have you ever done this before?”
“Oh, I’m not . . .”
“What’s your birth date?”
He hesitated. His mother had been scammed repeatedly by crooks disguised as authority figures when they first came to this country, and he had guardrails in place to prevent himself from giving out personal information under duress.
“October 22nd.” This, he realized, too late, was the baby’s birth date.
“Happy belated,” Baby Jane said. “Year?”
“1986.” This was the truth.
“And your time of birth?” He stared at her. Her face pooled into a sour frown. “This was all in the e-mail I sent you. The questionnaire? I can’t do anything without your time of birth.”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Sorry. 5:47 P.M.”
This, too, belonged to the baby. She typed it into whatever form she was filling out, and asked him his birthplace. He said Belgrade—although he realized, moments later, that his parents had still been living in Sarajevo when he was born.
“Belgrade,” Baby Jane said. “That’s in Montana?”
“Sure.” Anything, at this point, to keep her eyes off his face.
A printer whirred somewhere out of sight, and she pushed a printout of a rune-like wheel of symbols across the desktop toward him. It looked like a clock that had been in a car wreck. He examined it fretfully, upside down.
“Um,” he said.
“Don’t worry. You’re not supposed to know what it means. That’s my job. As you know”—she glanced up at him and frowned—“or maybe not: your sun is in Libra. Your moon’s in Gemini, and you have . . .”
“I don’t understand how any of this works.”
She tapped her fingers on the table. “I’m trying to explain it to you.” Now she was talking about ascendants and north nodes, trines and conjunctions. He wanted her to keep looking down at the star wheel so that she wouldn’t study his face. It was also too late now to tell her why he had really come. How was he supposed to introduce the subject of the bat? Here she was, with the star chart outlining the fate of a fictitious person who shared his baby’s birth date and time, and his birth year, and had come into this world in Belgrade, Montana, of all places.
“Wait,” he said. “I have a question.” He had blundered into a surprising thought. “Let’s say I was born on October 22nd. But I was actually supposed to have been born on November 10th. Would this all be different?”
“Completely,” Baby Jane said. “You’d be a Scorpio.”
“But what happens to the person I was supposed to be?”
“What do you mean?”
“The person I would have been if I’d been born at the right time.”
“But you were born at the right time. You were always going to be born when and where you were born.”
There was a knock at the door, and he jumped. Here was her actual nine o’clock, right on schedule. How was he going to explain himself? Baby Jane half stood. “Come in!”
To the husband’s amazement, in came Clownpants, from way up on the nineteenth floor.
“Hey there, darlin’!” he said in his usual, megawatt way. “Did you know there’s a dog sitting outside your door?”
Baby Jane made a disgusted face. “I’m so fucking sick of this building,” she said. “This used to be a classy place. Now it’s nothing but mutts and rap music. You know?”
If the husband hadn’t been frantically nodding in agreement, Clownpants probably wouldn’t have paid enough attention to recognize him. “Well, hey there, chief!” Clownpants said.
“Hey.”
They knew each other from the elevator and the refreshment table outside the gym, where they had bonded over their shared inability to resist cucumber water. The husband had recognized him right away as a character actor who often appeared in the late-career films of a controversial, perhaps even cancelled, director. Clownpants wasn’t leading-man material, but his work was scene-stealing. He was humble about it, too. “Every day I get to play is a blessing,” he’d say, crackling with a kind of intensity that had, at first, seemed like a performance, but was in fact just his way. The husband liked him, got a kick out of their interactions. It was the wife who had dubbed him Clownpants, for his tendency to power clash the patterns in his outfits.
Clownpants turned to Baby Jane. “Where is it?”
She gave a little shudder. “Bathroom,” she said.
Off went Clownpants in the direction of the guest bathroom. He emerged carrying a large plastic Tupperware, in which the bat was thrashing around.
“You weren’t kidding,” Clownpants said. “It’s huge.”
Baby Jane covered her eyes. “Get it out of here.”
Clownpants was holding the Tupperware at eye level. “Look at his face,” he said. “He’s perfect. He’s so angry. I guess I would be, too, if somebody put me in a box.” He grinned meaningfully at the husband, as though there were some obvious profundity to this that harked back to a previous exchange. When the husband failed to reciprocate, he raised his eyebrows at Baby Jane. “What are you dressing up as tonight, darlin’?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“Oh, come on. It’s spooky season,” he said, opening the door to leave. “You gotta get in the spirit! Bring your dancing shoes.”
The door fell shut behind Clownpants. Baby Jane was rubbing her ears irritably. She snatched the star chart back toward herself and cracked her neck. When she looked up to resume the husband’s reading, she finally recognized him. Her face went blank.
“Excuse me,” the husband said. “I’ll be right back.”
He shot out into the hallway. Clownpants was already halfway into the elevator. The husband dived in after him. They ascended, side by side, Clownpants with the Tupperware tucked into the crook of his arm. The bat’s claws skirled weirdly against the plastic as it struggled on. There it was, within arm’s reach. All he had to do was explain, tell a few self-deprecating jokes, ask if he could borrow it.
“Hey, man,” the husband said. “You really shouldn’t be handling that.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Clownpants said. “I’ve done this before. I get one every year for my Halloween party. You should come tonight! Bring your girl.”
“I would but, you know . . . we just had the baby.”
“No kidding! Blessings, amigo.” Clownpants absorbed him into a santal-perfumed half hug. “And your girl? Is she good?”
“She’s all right. It’s tough, you know, the recovery. It was a Cesarean,” he said.
“Oh!” Clownpants clapped him on the back. “Well, that’s good news for you, buddy.”
“We were just going in for the weekly checkup.” He was babbling, but he couldn’t seem to derail himself. “And then they told us, ‘You can’t go home—this has got to happen today.’ You know they had me just sit there while they cut her open? And when they said, ‘O.K., here comes baby,’ I stood up and looked right into her body.”
“Wow.” Clownpants shook his head.
“And then they just stitched her up and gave her Advil. You know?”
Clownpants looked at the panel of buttons. “I think we missed your floor.”
“A hundred years ago—hell, maybe even fifty—she probably wouldn’t have made it. I’d be a widower. And now it’s just Advil.”
“Well, like you said, she’s tough.” The elevator bell chimed, and Clownpants brightened. “It sounds like you got a lot on your plate, friend, but if you’re up to it: tonight, 10 P.M. till dawn, my place. Dress up!”
He could still hear the bat screeching for a few seconds after the doors closed.
Downstairs, the apartment was quiet. The sandwich he had left for his wife sat half eaten on the kitchen island. The baby was in her bassinet, exactly as he’d left her, scowling and straining in her sleep. Her tiny red face flickered with some distant inner feeling. Was she dreaming? What could somebody who wasn’t even meant to be in this world yet possibly be dreaming about?
His wife startled him with a nudge from behind. She held up her phone. “The front desk just called. Somebody found Murphy wandering around the sixth floor?”
The dog. He’d forgotten the dog. Now he had to stammer through some song and dance about how he’d come upstairs to see if maybe the dog had managed to get home on his own. He could see her shaking the bolts of this story loose in real time. Why hadn’t he called the dog’s name as soon as he came in? Why had he lingered to watch the baby sleep for almost three minutes?
The dog was sitting cheerfully behind the concierge desk. The husband took him upstairs and got back to work. He called the pediatrician and made a well-child appointment for Monday afternoon. He called his company’s H.R. department and added the baby to his insurance as a qualifying life event. This tickled the wife, who for the rest of the afternoon referred to the baby as a qualifying life event: “Hey, the qualifying life event just shit her britches. The qualifying life event needs a new burp cloth. The qualifying life event is finally down.”
He settled on the couch after dinner with the qualifying life event in his arms while his wife took a shower. A “Buffy” marathon was on, part of the countdown to Halloween. He sniffed the tufted little head that rested on his chest, wishing there were something between him and the occasional pulse of the fontanel. This was why babies were supposed to wear hats. He listened for his wife. The shower was still running. He dialled Labor and Delivery and explained the missing-hat situation to the nurse who picked up. “Oh,” the nurse said. “You’re that guy who keeps calling. Let me see if Casey has an update for you.”
A few moments later, Longshanks picked up. “Hi,” she said curtly.
“I know you guys have a lot going on,” he said. “It’s just—her little hat. We bought it when we found out that she was gonna make it. Please.”
Longshanks exhaled slowly. “I hear you,” she said. “I promise that if I find it, I will call you. But we have to keep this line clear for our patients. O.K.?”
He wanted to ask her when they had stopped being patients, and how this ejection from the fold might be reversed. After his wife went to bed, he returned to the couch and set the alarm for the baby’s next feeding. On the floor beside him, the dog was feebly pursuing some quarry in a dream. Outside, the city was tuning up for the first night of the weekend’s Halloween festivities. The itinerant taco truck that sometimes parked on the corner had been discovered by clubgoers on their way across the pedestrian bridge; he could tell by their voices that the line was around the block. Somewhere, “Thriller” was playing again. And still, even with all this sound, the apartment felt quiet. As though it were moving through time alongside the world, lonely and small, inaccessible to help.
He shined his phone flashlight at the dog. Flat red circles flared in the dog’s open eyes.
The summer the husband had turned six, a rabid fox had come down from the mountains into the seaside village where his grandmother lived and begun a small zombie apocalypse, infecting several local cats in the span of a few weeks, so that even after the fox had disappeared there was reason to fear the strays that haunted the restaurants and fish stalls. After a while, people had taken matters into their own hands. Cats with smashed-in skulls began appearing in dumpsters and street gutters. Was this what he was going to have to do to the dog? Take a rock, grit his teeth, and stave in that beautiful, trusting face? It was what his father would have done.
The husband imagined the virus, this ancient thing that he had let into the house, unfurling slowly through the dog’s nervous system. The timeline of symptoms was greatly dependent on the location of the wound through which the virus had been introduced. If the bat had bitten Murphy, where had it bitten him? His leg? His face?
Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe there was nothing to worry about. The dog had been vaccinated in puppyhood. And only one per cent of the colony’s bats were rabid. What were the odds that this particular bat numbered among them?
Higher, probably, than one per cent, since it had crashed on their balcony in broad daylight. But he could not be certain unless he got his hands on the bat. For a moment, the layers between thought and action lifted. Why was he sitting here, checking the dog’s pupils? The bat hadn’t disappeared. It was upstairs, in Clownpants’s apartment.
When he got to the nineteenth floor half an hour later, with the dog at his heels, he found the door to Clownpants’s apartment open. Some sort of fusion funk was pouring out into the hallway. A couple dressed as Roger and Jessica Rabbit stumbled out. He used their exit to make his way inside, where he hit the back of a line of extravagantly costumed bodies. He’d never seen so many white people in war bonnets. A Cleopatra with an actual snake wrapped around her neck cut in front of him. There was a sight-altering purple glare over everything. He struggled to make out the details of the room. On one wall sat a row of mounted cryptid heads: Bigfoot, Nessie, a chupacabra. On another, hologram portraits of Old West brothel girls changed to skeletons as he shuffled past.
One of the waiters put an appetizer plate into his hand. He was carried along the buffet line, gripping the plate and trying to hold the dog back from scarfing down the scraps that had made their way onto the floor: spiced almonds, roasted grapes, garlicky dolmas. Clownpants had separated everything into Halloween-themed categories: Slimy & Briny, Soft & Stinky, Sticky & Sweet. His wife would have appreciated such a playful little detail. Perhaps he could find a way to tell her about it, someday: “While you were picking the scabs from your nipples, I was hunting a rabid bat at a Halloween rager on the nineteenth floor.” He reached the dessert table, which was tiered, like an altar. Its centerpiece was an enormous round stone, which had been carved to look like an Aztec-style skull. Candles stood burning in its eye sockets. The hollow of its nose had been fitted with a small black cage in which the bat—his bat, their bat, his and the dog’s—was crashing around.
The husband jumped back so violently that a “Dark Knight”-era Joker behind him thought he had burned himself on one of the votives.
“You O.K., man?” the Joker said.
“That is a hygiene issue,” the husband shouted, pointing to the bat cage.
He tilted the contents of his plate into the nearest trash can and retreated to a corner to watch the glittering procession approach the dessert altar. Nobody seemed to give the live caged bat sprinkling its bat dust over the cake pops a second thought. Did none of these people think it was bizarre? Think it was dangerous and vile? Maybe it was a blessing that they didn’t. Maybe that was why none of them said anything when he plucked the bat cage out of the skull’s nose, and nobody stopped him when he made for the door.
The Animal Protection headquarters were right downtown, only a couple of blocks from their building, nestled innocuously beside a Western-wear shop on whose roof a massive neon boot rotated slowly against the dark. To his dismay, it was closed for the night. He rattled the door handle and waited to see if somebody would appear. What were people supposed to do if they had an animal emergency after 7 P.M.? He dialled the number and went through each of the menu items, sending two calls from his wife to voice mail until he was better situated to talk to her. His only after-hours option, according to the menu, was to call the police.
He bought the dog and himself a scoop of vanilla each at the soft-serve place next door and sat down on the curb in front of Animal Protection with the bat cage between his knees. The bat was still alive, dragging itself along the cage bottom in a manner that seemed to signal some new level of defeat. A couple of passing witches in distressed fish-nets aww-ed at the sight of the dog begging for the second half of his cone. Behind them came a strikingly handsome Captain Hook and, right on his heels, a passable seventies-era Elton John. A group dressed up as the Justice League paused to take a selfie in front of where the husband was sitting. Their Superman hadn’t bothered to spring for the whole costume. As far as the husband could tell, he was just wearing a pair of dark-rimmed glasses and a tight suit with the shirt half unbuttoned and a Superman tee exposed beneath. For some reason, this made the husband wildly, irrationally angry. Everyone else had gone all out for this group undertaking. Wonder Woman even had a lasso that glowed in the dark. And here was Superman, half-assing it as usual. As the husband watched, Superman finished his cigarette and flicked the gleaming butt away. It flashed briefly in its arc before landing on the husband’s pant leg. He swatted at it.
“What the fuck,” he said.
Superman turned. “Excuse me?”
“Excuse me nothing,” he said. “You don’t see me? I’m sitting right here.”
“Good. Stay sitting there. That way people don’t have to look at you.”
“I can tell by looking at you that you’re a total cunt.” The rest of the Justice League fell silent.
Superman—Clark Kent, really—took a step toward him. “What are you trying to do here, buddy?”
The husband said it again.
He hadn’t been in a fight since high school. His former self, a handy enough brawler, not only would have seen the kick coming but would have deflected it and managed to send an opponent dishonorable enough to deal it sprawling. But the kick caught his current self right in the chest. He fell sideways, and from this position absorbed a few more blows before the rest of the Justice League jumped in and hauled Superman down the street.
He lay face down on the sidewalk, grateful that Superman hadn’t displaced his rage onto the dog. The phone in his pocket was buzzing. His poor wife. There’d be a pile of pump parts in the sink by now, a tract of empty boxes on the input-output log. Somewhere, an indentured Amazon employee was probably already stuffing the knockoff tomato-stem hat into a plastic envelope. If he bled to death internally here, his wife would open the package in two days’ time and know that he had lied. He would never get the chance to explain himself.
He sat up finally and took inventory of the damage. The dog was sitting beside him, obliterating the remnants of the ice-cream cone he’d dropped when Superman laid him out. The bat cage lay on its side. He righted it and discovered, to his horror, that Superman’s kick had widened one set of bars. The bat was gone. He searched the ground for it on hands and knees, like a madman. Then he looked up at the dog and saw, dangling from the dog’s guilty, greedy mouth, the tragic sag of the bat’s legs and tail.
“Murphy, no!” He grabbed the dog’s face. “Drop it, drop it, drop it.”
Surprisingly, the dog obeyed. The bat lay on its back, soggy and wretched, here in the waning hours of this terrible day. Now the husband had to pick it up and return it somehow to its cage. In his pocket he found one of the green poop bags he had amassed from the Mutt Mitt dispensers at the park. It would have to do. He secured it over his hand and reached down, and this was when the bat, animated by some primordial force that would not let the curtain fall, sprang from the ground in a final, dizzying play for its life and flew away.
It was nearly dawn when he pulled off the freeway toward the veterinary clinic. The dog’s teeth began chattering. He tried to relax so that the dog wouldn’t smell the doom on him, but all he could think about was the distance between where he was and where he needed to be. His wife had probably called the police by now. Had likely started calling hospitals, shouting his name and description over the baby’s guttering wails, into the ears of phone operators and receptionists all over town. Had she found the time to eat something? To pee, to shower? Was she remembering to use the nipple everter? Overhead, the trees were turning pale green with morning light. Around the next bend, the cursed driveway to the veterinary clinic opened up out of nowhere to his right. He kept going. Mostly to confuse the dog but also to give himself courage. He took the next right and went all the way around the block. Then he did it again. The dog pressed his nose against the glass, keening whenever the driveway whooshed by.
On the third pass, the husband swerved finally into the parking lot. It was empty. He drove to the far end to give himself space to maneuver. The moment he turned off the car, the dog sprang into the back, where he encountered the bewildering obstacle of the car-seat base. The husband climbed out and walked around the rear of the car and opened the door, to which the dog instantly responded by jumping back into the passenger seat. He turned around and showed his teeth.
“That’s fine,” the husband said. “You go right ahead. I got all day.”
In truth, he had about twelve minutes until the clinic opened. He would get the dog out of the car by then, one way or another. Would carry him if he had to. Pin him down for the shot with his own two hands. He would obliterate all the tedious, delicate work they had put into insuring that the dog formed positive associations with this place. And then what? His wife would open the credit-card bill next month. She would see a charge for three hundred and sixty dollars at Clover Creek Animal Hospital. She would note the date of service. Within seconds, she’d be leaning against the door of his home office, going, “Why were you at the vet two days after we came home from the hospital?” And, in the end, he would have to confess that he had endangered them all.
He opened the passenger door. The dog scrabbled into the driver’s seat. All this back and forth had knotted the leash around the center console. The husband freed one loop, then another, and used the momentum to pull the dog toward him and out of the car. The instant he hit the ground, the dog started struggling against the harness. This was why they kept it so tight. The husband grabbed the chest brace to hold him still, and for his gall received a strike to the arm from every tooth in the dog’s crazy, contorted face. His skin started to bruise immediately. He didn’t know if this technically counted as drawing blood. The dog didn’t look the least bit sorry.
“Come on,” the husband said, and grabbed him, but the dog twisted himself one last time and finally slid out of the harness like a banana coming out of its peel. Now the husband was standing there with the empty red tangle of clips and nylon in his hand while the dog fled, tail tucked, up the slope toward the parking-lot entrance and the road beyond.
“No!” the husband called. “God, no!”
He couldn’t see the cars from where he was standing, but he could hear them zooming by the blind drive, going twenty over the limit because it was morning, because it was Saturday, because it was Texas. He listened for the screech of brakes and the heart-stopping yelp of the dog, saw his own headstone as he sprinted toward the road. The dog was sitting on the far side, at the edge of the woods, looking at him reproachfully.
The husband looked right, then left, then right again. The road was empty. He started across, but the dog moved away from him into the trees, so he stopped. He stood for a few seconds with his feet on the double yellow line, trying to figure out what to do next. If he started back toward his own vehicle, the dog might follow. Was that what he should do? Draw their dog into the path of some gleaming silver F-150? In puppyhood, he had held this beloved, preposterous animal on his chest, just as he now held their daughter, and waltzed around the room with him, humming “Moon River” until the warm little body went limp. If he could just let go of that, the dog’s journey could end here. He could run off into the woods, taking the suspect contents of his cerebrospinal fluid with him. Not that this would change anything. The husband would have to offer himself up for a course of shots regardless. He’d suffered an exposure. He would have to fill out a bite report and put the dog’s name down under “attacking animal.” Wouldn’t that spell doom, too?
He had been backing away slowly all this time. He only realized it now because the dog came swiftly out of the trees and into the road after him. A black car approaching from the left braked and swerved. The husband closed his eyes. He heard a yelp, but then the car sped relentlessly on. The dog was still standing nervously there, looking at him. Another car was coming up over the hill from the opposite direction. Ten, maybe fifteen seconds away. He knelt down and patted the ground in front of him. “Come,” he said. “Come.”
When the dog was finally in his arms, his whole body pulsing with the force of his heartbeats, the husband sank his face into the dog’s musty neck and let himself be still. There was so much to lose, and so many different ways to lose it.
His phone was buzzing. He wiped his face, pressed the dog to himself, and, with his free hand, pulled the phone out of his pocket. He knew that number. He knew it by heart. ♦