"Small Animal"- by Wenshu Wang
It’s natural for kids to have spats like this, my mother had said. I knew it was different that day, though. I remember it clearly now: the scraping of our voices, the sun, the whirring of the fan in the heat. On the drive home, my mother spoke how she always did. She wishes I wouldn’t egg him on like that, she had said. We’re all moving towards the same thing. Her eyes were on the road, fixed to nothing. We’re like a family, after all. We have to look out for each other.
I spent a lot of time with Peng back then. After school I would go to his house, my bus pulling into the cracked loop at the end of his street every weekday, Peng playing Silent Hill II on the TV when I arrived. The game never seemed to end. I’d come in on the same hallway, the same static hiss of my footsteps against hardwood, and would hear that same low breathing in the soundtrack, the overtaking of the fog once again. Peng learned every route by heart, and would keep savepoints to replay over again. He liked the nurses, I think, and I would tell him that the point was that James was a pervert and that they were caricatures of his desire, liking them would make Peng as bad as him, but he wouldn’t be listening.
While I was there, I found things for myself to do: I read books off his shelf, practiced card tricks, pulled at loose threads in the couch cushion. Mostly, though, I watched him play. Sometimes his father who wasn’t my father would come out and play his guitar at us, or stand in the doorway and say strange, declarative things. He was one of those people believing in the confidence of revelation, someone who indulged in books on transcendentalism and planes of consciousness. Who are you to yourself? He would ask. What parts of you are of memory? After he asked and we could not, would not, answer, he would be satisfied and retreat back across the hallway, us left again in the din of the whirring heat.
I did not think he could speak to the importance of memory, because that was all he really had: the stillness of this invisible past, his cessation to its own. How dare he, I would think, confine us to these irrefutable truths, attach his lived life to futures that weren’t his? I supposed this dogma comforted him, and in this I found comfort in my own.
Every weekday I’d go back to see him after school. On weekends it stretched longer, hours folding into each other in strips. I got paid a dollar on the hour for being there, courtesy of my mother. I had racked up a pretty decent sum. Still, it was the same: Peng glued to the screen, my presence in the periphery. I would nudge him, hit him when he got too rowdy on the console.
Outside, the town moved slowly in its habits. There was the highway that cut clean through it, the Dollar General, the Piggly Wiggly, the Baptist church with its marquee that changed every Wednesday. Soybean fields pressed up against subdivisions where the lawns never quite held in the summer heat. The sky was enormous. Nothing interrupted it for long. When you stood at the edge of town, you could see how flat it all was: how far a body could travel without obstruction.
It did something to you, that flatness. It trained your eye outward, toward distances you could measure but not quite believe in. The horizon was always available, a thin promise you could walk toward forever and never reach. There were no mountains to lean against, no buildings tall enough to interrupt your thoughts. You were left exposed to yourself.
Peng’s house sat near the end of a cul-de-sac where the pavement cracked into spiderwebs. His yard backed into a drainage ditch that flooded in the spring. We existed there in a small radius: bus stop to living room, living room to console, console to bus stop again. It felt like a contained system, self-sustaining. As long as he stayed, the map did not expand.
And when he was focused I’d tell him that sometimes I feel there’s some small animal inside me, a pulse that presses against my rib cage, and isn’t that an interesting thought? I don’t tell him of the silliness I found in my musings. We can’t share that joke, I thought, and he doesn’t presume to—I don’t think he hears me much at all, his eyes fixed to the darkening screen.
After his father left the house, his aunt came to whisk him away to a far off place, somewhere up in the Northwest. This leaving felt provisional, and so I accepted it easily. I remember thinking about this far away place, a slope of land and weather I cannot picture, my staying where I am. Before he left, we began to argue in ways we hadn’t before. Not about anything that mattered: the game, whose turn it was on the computer, calendar dates and names and useless, fleeting details of memory. The animal in me had grown restless, pacing. I found myself testing him, needling at small things, and he would respond with a new indifference. Later, I tried to imagine him there, walking streets that tilted upward instead of stretching flat into the horizon. In Arkansas, nothing enclosed you. The fields opened and opened until the sky swallowed them.
I think about distance, and the animal presses ever closer and I feel there is no escaping this escape, its restless course towards the top of that hill and the slope downwards again. For years I am glad I cannot see him, and that in his mind, I will always be greater than that version of me engulfed in time, my own linearity.
The truth was, I didn’t care about his future in the ways that would have made me decent; I didn’t care much, whether he did well or poorly, if he got sent to prison for ten years or was left to die in the old place. That kind of outcome felt abstract to me. I wondered if this was what love looked like when stripped of responsibility: if wanting someone near was not the same as wanting them well, if proximity could substitute for care, if keeping someone within your radius was its own kind of selfish geography. When I close my eyes I am hurtling towards nothing, turning into loops of myself.
At night I would feel the slashes across my body and wake in pain. I felt my selfishness was the cause, this wanting bringing about the feeling. Back then, my fear was a mantra: I thought that suffering was an easy incantation, that one must only think to feel. I believed attention alone could make a thing real. I had heard from someone that you always dream about the last thing in your subconscious before sleep, so I liked to picture Peng’s face as hard as I could, pressing each impossible future into the corners of my mind, every recess. These days I do this less. Sometimes I may try, but, feeling too greedy, I push him from my mind before sleep takes hold.
In these shameful dreams, we are here at the market, Peng trailing behind me in the open sunlight. There is a span of days in this one moment, the clouds shifting forward and collapsing into each other in bursts of light. It’s a beautiful day, a man says, and he does so with such good cheer that one would have to believe him. I can see it with my own eyes, but even when I close them the sun cuts through my eyelids in that hazy, blazing, beautiful orange. Peng is tugging at my shirt now. I am still moving. I buy him a custard and, as he collects it, walk forth into the street, and again he’s following me, my staggering towards the light.
