They Had Goat Heads

VICTROLA





I place the Victrola on the kitchen counter and wait for somebody to get a midnight snack. I hear my mother, upstairs, punctuating the flat notes of birdsongs. I hear my father, too. That rankled snore . . .

Lips sealed, my parents walk into the kitchen holding hands. They see me. They poke around the cupboards, looking for instant coffee. “Decaffeinated,” says my father sternly.

I say, “Coffee isn’t a snack. It’s a drink. It’s a pastime.”

They turn their heads and stare at me. I realize I haven’t said anything.

They give up and go back upstairs and the catastrophe of their discord recommences, instantly. Inhuman melodies forced from two strangled radios . . .

I wait, listening . . .

Finally somebody makes an appearance. A stranger. He wears a three-piece suit and a stovepipe hat that scrapes across the ceiling as he strides toward the refrigerator. I engage the Victrola, placing its needle on an old record. The record is warped and produces harsh static before articulating these words: “Welcome to the kitchen. I am your host. I hope you enjoy a snack. You must enjoy things. Eventually you will die.” I mouth the words as they yawn out of the machine’s fleur-de-lis. The stranger stops in his tracks and regards me with wide, unblinking eyes. He sucks in his cheeks. The Victrola says, “You look hungry. You should eat something. If you are not killed in a freak accident, eventually your body will eat you. Cancer, you see. Our bodies always eat us in the end.” I continue to mouth the words. The stranger removes his hat and sits on the floor.

My parents return. They dance around the stranger and rifle through the cupboards again. They think that if they look hard enough a jar of decaffeinated coffee crystals will appear, somewhere, behind something, even though I know there is no coffee in the house, and they know it, too.

They give up again. “That’s life, son,” says my mother, tilting her head. “One failure after another. But one must continue to fail. Otherwise one ceases to be human.”

My father grabs her violently and jerks her from side to side. He pushes her over and wrestles with her on the kitchen floor, ripping buttons from her nightgown. The stranger observes the skirmish idly.

Winded, my parents get up. My father takes my mother in his arms and they slip away . . .

Upstairs my mother’s tune changes: she shifts from the flat notes of birdsongs to the emotional drones of power ballads. And my father’s snore gives birth to hundreds of minor snores.

. . . This is the climax. The stranger knows it. I know it. The Victrola confirms it, saying, “I am very pleased to meet you. You are diseased. Goodnight.” I remove the needle from the record as the stranger lies flat and curls into a languid ball. I watch. I listen to my mother and father’s muffled voices. They intersect and accomplish a crescendo, then roll out and taper off, fatigued, paling, until the only thing I can hear is the hush of ocean surf, the Victrola’s fleur-de-lis whispering like a conch.

WHALE—WITH A SURPRISE ALTERNATE (HAPPY) ENDING!!!

My daughter wanted a goldfish. I said, “We can do better than that.”

I took her to the pet shop and asked a clerk where the whales were. She escorted us through a maze of aisles into a separate room, pausing to reprimand a stock boy who had stolen a nap. My daughter gazed wide-eyed at the caged lizards, birds, insects, monkeys that we passed en route . . .

“This is what we call the Whale Room,” said the clerk. She made a sweeping motion with her arm. “We also have an Elephant Room and Brontosaurus Room. The dinosaurs aren’t real.” She gave us a hand buzzer and told us to press it if we needed anything.

Excusing herself, she closed and locked the door behind her. My daughter and I looked at each other, then at the Whale Room.

It was the size of an airplane hangar and smelled like a bowl of cereal. “Golden Grahams,” said my daughter, nodding. I told her cereal didn’t smell like anything unless you got really close to it and sniffed very, very deeply. My daughter said, “That’s silly, Daddy.”

The concrete floor was immaculate and had been cleaned, lacquered, and dusted. An aquarium the size of a two-story house stood at the far corner. There was nothing else.

I put my daughter on my shoulders and we walked to the aquarium.

The bluegreen water glowed with toxicity.

A copious layer of fluorescent cow and pig skulls had been spread across the floor of the aquarium. Aggressive algae-eaters darted in and out of the eye sockets and jaws, unhinged for lack of any food other than their own regurgitated stool.

There was no whale.

My daughter began to cry.

I pressed the hand-buzzer. Nobody came. I pressed it again and again and again. My daughter cried harder and I told her not to worry. “Things always work out, somehow.”

Finally the clerk attended to us. I assumed it was the clerk; she was far away and I didn’t have my glasses on, and she put on an ornate gas mask as she approached the aquarium. She spoke to me through a contraption resembling a CB radio, holding the microphone to the mouth-chute of the mask. A cord attached the microphone to a long, cumbersome speaker she held at her side like a suitcase.

“Good afternoon,” she said when she reached us. The greeting boomed out of the speaker and echoed across the Whale Room. “It is a pleasure to see you again.”

I put my daughter down. Sniffling, she cowered between my knees. I stroked her hair reassuringly and said, “Don’t worry, little girl.” I looked at the clerk. “You’re frightening my daughter. What is this?” I gesticulated at the aquarium.

Harsh sledges of static punctuated the clerk’s subsequent monologue: “Ah yes, I forgot. We had to submit the mammal for repair. Too many potential buyers requested to see inside of the mammal. All of the potential buyers said the same thing: ‘We won’t consider purchasing this unit unless we can see inside of it.’ So the owners of the pet shop had a meeting and decided to install a series of zippers onto its vast girth. ‘Consumer thirst must be slaked,’ they said. That’s exactly what they said. This decision was made only recently and we only recently sent it away. You should have seen me duke it out with the mammal; I pushed its head back into the wall with both of my hands while monstrous tidbits fell from its mouth to the floor. For a moment I thought we had become friends. But the whale quickly reminded me that we would always be enemies, biting off my arm.” She showed us her arms, one at a time. Neither arm had been bitten off. “Well. I promise the whale will return soon. In fact, we expect to receive two additional units, all of them equipped with zippers that might be opened and closed in a highly user-friendly manner by courageous scuba divers. In their absence, perhaps you could exercise your imagination. Tell yourself the whale is there. The mind cannot deny what you tell it.”

The clerk bowed awkwardly and excused herself. We watched her walk away, across the expanse of the Whale Room. She walked slowly. It took over two minutes. She tripped once, dropping the speaker. She got up and tripped again when she tried to pick the speaker back up—I suspected it was much heavier than it looked. Then she disappeared through a thin rectangle of door.

My daughter and I held hands and stared at the aquarium. “Don’t believe that horseshit about imagination,” I told her. “The real thing is always better. That’s why the imagination exists. Mostly, people can’t get the real things they want. So they have to pretend.”

The algae-eaters threaded through the skulls. They seemed to multiply before our eyes as they devoured crumbs of excrement . . .

It took some convincing. But eventually my daughter talked me into it.

We stripped to our underwear and climbed a ladder that ran up the aquarium’s exterior, its rungs cold and sharp on the soles of our feet.

“I wish we had snorkels,” my daughter said.

“Lungs are good enough,” I replied. “Remember to take a deep breath.”

At the top was a small square platform. We situated ourselves on it, pinched our noses, counted to three, and jumped in . . . We sank to the bottom, smiling at each other even though the water stung our eyes. The algae-eaters scattered as we landed on the skulls. They were slick to the touch, like warm balls of oil—we handled them, and we got tangled in them, and we slipped through them . . . There was nothing we could do. We fell deeper and deeper into the colored bone . . .

As we disappeared from sight, my daughter pointed overhead, excitedly, as if to acknowledge the extraordinary passing of a cloud.