Only the Animals Read online

  ‘You will find no food under their tanks,’ I said. ‘I know. I am German. They don’t keep food there.’

  ‘There is always food beneath the tanks,’ she said.

  She refused to talk to me again. Two days later, she was led out of the warren with the pouch strapped to her back.

  * * *

  My turn came. I was led outside. The pouch was heavier than I had imagined, and the sunlight blinding. The men pelted me with stones to make me run in the direction of my own camp.

  I set my nose to the ground to try to find my way back to the Germans, to my compatriots, hoping one of them would risk everything to save me, and get the metal blight off my back. I picked up a scent leading to the west and followed it, unaware how much time I had.

  But I was too weak; I could not find their camp. I collapsed beneath a tree in the wilderness. I tried to think only positive thoughts. Perhaps, just perhaps, I could still be reincarnated as a human being, as my Master had promised. Maybe the morning star – or was it the evening star? – would rise for me after all.

  The pouch ticked with a metallic pulse of its own. I tried to get myself into something resembling corpse pose so that I could meditate like my Master had on the cold floor of the crypt at Wewelsburg.

  I breathed in, and breathed out, and imagined that I was the legendary wolf Fenris, son of the Norse god of fire, who grew to be so strong and ferocious that the gods themselves became afraid and decided to forge a chain to restrain him. This chain was made of elements so elusive they could scarcely be said to exist: the roots of mountains, the breath of fish, the sound of a cat’s footsteps. It was almost invisible, yet so strong it could keep Fenris at bay until the final battle of the gods, when the legend was that he would break free. On my back the pouch ticked. From far away, I heard my Master reciting in his hypnotic voice these words to me in front of the fire: I am the great wolf Fenris, broken free from my chains …

  SOMEWHERE ALONG THE LINE THE PEARL WOULD BE HANDED TO ME

  Soul of Mussel

  DIED 1941, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Jack loved animals (especially cats) and once wrote that when the aliens finally land on planet Earth, they will be shocked to see the way humans treat their animal brothers and sisters, ‘down to the very worms yay.’

  Helen Weaver, ex-lover of Jack Kerouac

  I first met Muss right when I’d decided that everything was dead, when I was sick of putting down the world with theories. Muss turned up overnight in our circle with a bit of the ecstatic in him, a joyous prophet, a conman curious about everything. My friend Gallos who’d crashed on my pier in the Hudson River for a while to write his poetry, he’s the one who introduced me to Muss. Story was he’d grown up poor and tough on an underwater farm out west, surrounded by crooked sad characters he loved and he hated, and somehow he’d made it to New York City all the way from the waters off Washington. Muss didn’t know much, but he knew it didn’t make him tick to be told from his earliest days as a juvenile blue mussel what to do, what to eat, when to secrete threads from his byssus pit, which artificial pipes to attach to and in what pattern.

  Shell-crushing, sad labour of the body. He’d left behind a little girlfriend still filtering water out west but he couldn’t stick around to look after her and have his spirit stolen bit by bit. He was looking – hell, we all were looking – for a new way of being, something loose, open-ended. He told us he’d hitched cross-country overland and through the Great Lakes, then on a cargo ship slipping through canals, then in cold storage, then in a bucket of seawater that kept him alive on a freight train, and finally he’d been dumped out in the Hudson, which was right where he wanted to be dumped all along.

  ‘Wow! Man!’ he kept saying the first time we talked. ‘There’s so many things to do and tell and feel and write and – no more fluctuating, okay, Sel, no more untrue knowledge!’

  And I agreed. No more untruths.

  For a while after Muss arrived, he and Gallos were connected on an invisible circuit of madman energy. Gallos memorised everything Muss said and became his disciple because he thought there was something raw and real about him and the rest of us were cooked. They had a thing where they talked fiendishly, all-day-all-night talk, six, eight, ten hours straight, trying to share everything, every single fleeting thought or twinge or appetite. I followed and listened and was interested in them because they were mad and burning with it, and they liked to have an audience for their madness. It put some method in it. Muss would visit Gallos on our pier and I would sit next to them with my shell half open, listening. They’d face each other, open their shells wide, and get down to business.

  ‘When you moved further down the pier this morning and we passed the old mussel who told you to keep quiet, you remember, I think there was a shoelace or something blowing in the water currents, and I wanted to tell you it reminded me of a piece of seaweed —’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course I remember – and now you’ve reminded me of the thought I was having right then, about the sadness of these throwaway things and how it made my shell ache all over with —’

  ‘But do you remember the smell in the water, fishier than normal and with a gasoline undertow to it?’

  ‘There were industrial specks in the water, but more salt than fish. The water felt clearer at the bottom —’

  ‘No, the light was still at the surface, murkier below…’

  And so they would go until the sun was coming up and the night had passed, and Muss would say, ‘My body is sore and hot and I want to sleep. Let’s stop the machine.’

  ‘You can’t stop the machine!’ Gallos would yell.

  ‘Stop the machine,’ I’d say, and then they’d be interested that I had been awake and listening to them all the night and they wanted to know how it made me feel and I would say, ‘I feel that you’re maniacs and I want to know what happens as you go along in the world.’

  Then the smell of festy spring invaded the waters of the Hudson and we felt the sun grow warmer on our shells as we were left exposed on the piers in between tides, and I knew I had to get moving and follow my strange significant friend Muss with all his loveproblems wherever he was going across the whole damn country and see for myself the farm he grew up on, the American root of it all. And follow him further, to San Francisco and all its foggy openness. He had another girl in the Bay there and he said she’d let us move in with her and look after us a bit, let us rest our weary happy bodies until we wanted to move on again, no guilt, no bother.

  I couldn’t convince my girl to leave the Hudson and come with us and Muss said it was no use, that I’d find a real great girl someplace else if only I could cultivate her and make her mind my soul as he had tried and failed with every girl of his own. My girl was unhappy when I said I was off, and I thought I must be crazy, leaving her behind. But I let go of the pier I’d been clinging to for too long, put down my foot on the river floor and began to move away from her. I put a gap between us, too wide to touch across it. She turned her shell on me and went back to pumping water past her gills emotionlessly and in the underwater twilight I cursed life that it has to be so goddamned sad.

  So Muss and Gallos and I, we hitched a ride on the hull of a cargo ship that Muss said would get us some ways on our journey, at least until we could drop off onto a loading dock somewhere and get picked up by a truck or train going cross-country. He said we had to hotfoot it across the middle bits or else we would dry out and die, physically and soulfully, oh yes, we would. And soon as he’d promised, we were on the road, heading west, the tarmac blurry beneath our crate, and stars, real stars, above and we knew we were alive.

  Part of the ways into the big open land, we came across distant cousins of Muss’s, zebra mussels who scared me stiff with their stripes and their violent, hurly-burlied way of taking what they felt was theirs for the taking. Gallos said I should be interested in them – they were different and different was what I was looking for, so we followed Muss to a party they told him about, a
place where there’d be girls. This was freshwater territory and we knew we couldn’t stay too long or else we’d be submerged and die, craving salt, but Muss needed sex the way most blue mussels need saltwater: it was holy to him and solved most everything.

  We met his cousins at the exposed pipe when the tide was right and man oh man, did we get a shock that there was not an inch of space on that pipe, just zebra mussel shells packed on thick. Muss said they were halfway to covering the whole bottom of the lakes too, that there was not a single native mussel left to tell us stories. He got talking to one of the girls and that opened up some of her friends to talking to me and Gallos, until I asked about the native pearly mussels and where they’d all gone. Then the girls got bitter and closed their shells and left us to worry about their brothers turning up. I tried to explain I’d grown up in the Hudson with dream-myths about the original pearlies out west, how beautiful their shells had been, so many shapes and colours that the humans who’d first found them gave a new name to each one tugged from the watershed.

  Muss came back after feeling up his zebra mussel girl and we detached from the pipe and went on our way in a box full of bait in the back of a truck, and Muss said he hoped we were heading somewhere on the West Coast. I felt the hot wind start to dry me up, and I thought about dying and all the native pearly mussel names I could remember, the ones my aunt back in the Hudson had taught me as a juvenile. Gallos got inspired and made them into a little poem. It went:

  Paper pond, squaw foot, elk toe shell

  Pimple-back, Lilliput, fat mucket shell

  Pink heel-splitter

  Purple hackle-back

  Pocketbook, snuffbox, fragile riffle shell

  That was the poem. Thing that made it work was, he’d shout it out, kind of urgent-sounding: ‘Paper pond, squaw foot, elk toe shell!’ As if he were shouting the names of the dead.

  Lucky for us, we got dumped out into the sea off the far northern West Coast. Ah to be in saltwater again, joyful salty sucking up of juices! Being on the road was good, but we weren’t really ready for it, not yet; we’d only just left home, our little bodies were too soft, our minds were still forming philosophies. A boat was a better bet right then while we figured it all out, and sure enough, next thing we’d hitched a ride on a fishing vessel to Bremerton, Washington, Muss’s homewaters and source of his pain and his sustenance. His old father had been on the underwater farm so long Muss told us he’d forgotten he once used to be free, that he could still be free if he only untied his threads and pushed off.

  But when we got there, we couldn’t find him no matter where we searched up and down the quiet hanging rows, packed thick with our brethren. Some of the elder mussels pinched their shells tight with disapproval and said to Muss his daddy had gone missing soon after Muss left, that nobody had seen him in a real long time, that he most probably had been harvested and taken up above to die. Then one of them, real crusty old bastard, said, ‘You boys shouldn’t be taking chances. God knows what’s gonna come for you out in the deep blue. Stay put, stay here awhiles.’ He leered at us, at our young flesh.

  Muss got to howling about his daddy, and Gallos and I wanted out of there. So we dragged Muss with us and strayed a ways from the farm, lost and glum. It sure had taken the water out our siphons to get to the farm and find it was nothing but eerie order and rules and fear, not the root of anything. We drifted, floating, sensed the light fading and the predatory seagulls swooping above the wharves. The water beneath the dock lapped against the stinking timbers. The harbour was still and bleak. From the dimmed-out shore came a deep sigh.

  And then, in the morning, we found it. The battleship. A beautiful thing, vessel of adventure, her dark shape blocking out the sunlight in the water above us, and we all felt it, a tingling promise. It was what we’d been looking for, the gorgeous chance to be tested, to leave it all behind, to join the brotherhood of those prepared to risk it all at sea. We floated closer and found a small hull-fouling young runaway community already growing on the battleship’s sleek side, and we decided to hitch a ride alongside, not knowing anything except we wanted to keep getting further away from what we knew. The boys and I got set up nice and close on the toxic surface – the stuff the humans had painted on it didn’t keep us off, just kept us high on fumes – and did a bit of secreting among the other stowaways, just enough so we could cling on for the journey but not get bogged down in routine.

  The whole goal was detachment, gathering no algae, freewheeling. Me and Gallos and Muss, and another old friend of Muss’s, Bluey, a real mild guy who’d come along with us from the farm, we would talk all the time about how we could practise non-attachment while depending for our survival on attaching to a base with our byssus threads. Bluey, he was lonely even when he was surrounded by other mussels, didn’t know what was wrong with himself. He liked to watch his byssal secretions harden as they left his pit and made contact with the seawater and thought the root of all our troubles, all our sadness, was that we tried to fight the threads becoming so strong we’d never move again, tried to remain suspended in that moment of viscosity forever. He said true bliss would only come if we gave in and attached. But even Bluey knew he had to have an adventure in his halcyon days that he could feed off for the rest of his stationary life.

  Muss and Gallos weren’t so sure at first about hitching on a US Navy vessel, thought it was some kind of bowing down to the human establishment. As long as we were moving and moving someplace interesting, that’s all I cared about. And when that battleship, that great grey tub of metal, got going on her shakedown cruise, and we felt the booming blast of the stack, and the blast of departure vibrating underwater, and the piston charges rumbling, and the giant churning of the propeller, and the water begin to move through our bodies … boy, did it feel good. Alackadaddy, we were on the move again!

  Around us, the seascape changed as we steamed along and soon did not remind me of anything. I could take the experience into myself without it being referential and it blew my mind: each new piece of seagrass, each fish, each dot in the delicious marine snow layer of microscopic creatures so thick it sometimes blocked out the sunlight, each ocean pebble. We starved some days when the ship went so fast we couldn’t trap enough tidbits, and other days we ate and ate when it slowed down, filtering and siphoning and funnelling fast as we could, and the plankton got richer and plumper the further south along the coast we moved.

  The other stowaways told us things. Some of them had been at sea a long time, had a taste for hull living. One of the oldest had a bit of tragedy in his soul. He’d spent days and nights attached to a life raft along with a human shipwreck survivor, a young fellow who gave up and jumped off the raft to drown in the Carolinian sea. This mussel said, ‘You know what I learned, clinging to the life raft, feeling the heaving ocean pitching high then dropping low to reveal the sky? That the seasky is wild and beautiful as the sea itself.’

  At rare moments, when the water was sugarstill, we could sense bits of the lives of the men being trained above us, in the battleship. The song of one of the cooks at sunrise: ‘Everybody want to go to Heaven, but no one want to die!’ The slamming pots and clattering dishes from the galley at breakfast; the throb-boom of the engines; the shouts of men playing dice on a full-moon howling night, the battleship’s funnel, silhouetted against the moon, letting off clouds of blue smoke to darken the stars. Somebody on the gun crew gazing down into the dark and tremendous water of the sea, looking like he could see us all clear as day. One calm afternoon, the sea flashing green and gold, we heard the muffled shriek of a bell-whistle, the warning words: ‘All hands to the boat deck. All hands to the boat deck.’ Quiet followed. We waited. Our disappointment that it was nothing but make-believe: ‘Drill dismissed. Drill dismissed.’

  The boys and I had found a good spot on the hull in the middle of the clump of stowaways, so we had no trouble with the force of the water when it was stormy. A couple of kids at the outer edge got washed off one night when the seas wer
e violent, and nothing we could do about it. Bluey got sad, sure, like always, and we thought about what their lives might be like wherever they landed. Maybe they would survive, catch another ride on a different hull, and who knows where that might lead them?

  We lost some, we gained some. Blue mussel larvae, the real drifters, latched onto our hull at some point in our journey. One of them grew into a real beautiful girl with golden threads who Muss had a diggy thing for but she was more interested in me. We let her move in beside us, and told her what we knew about the world. ‘Wow,’ she said all the time. ‘Wow.’ And lots of glee-giggles, and next thing I thought I loved her. During our nighttime doings, Muss lay awake and listened and I was glad to let him edge in on our love wave. The girl was real nervous of spawning, and I tried to tell her it was beautiful but I lost control and it wasn’t so beautiful. She sighed in the dark and I asked her, ‘What do you want out of life?’ which was something I used to ask all the time of girls.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said and yawned, and I wanted to cover her shell opening and tell her never to yawn, that it was not allowed, that life was too full of newness for her to be tired.

  She told me her story. Survived six months as a lone larval drifter in the deepest ocean, never knew her parents. There was something different about her, couldn’t figure it out at first. Then I got it: she was the first girl I’d ever known who didn’t want to settle down, who I knew would leave me behind. She disappeared one day while Muss and I were arguing about the nature of reality. I got mad at him like a bullnecked idiot and we had our first real fight. Bluey sensed the shift and got sad, Gallos got jealous. Muss and I forgave each other and he made me repeat back to him: Experience is all. Right then I wanted to be inside his mind, it was that kind of hunger, something I’d never felt for a girl because a girl’s mind had never grabbed me like that. I wanted to devour his thoughts. That’s what I told him, and he understood.