Pretty Boys, Dirty Cats

The train attendant stops in front of me, says: get your feet off the seat. He wears this pale blue collared shirt, tucked into pants two sizes too small. Stomach spills over waistband in a collapsing way. He looks like he likes telling people what to do. I lower my feet without looking him in the eyes.

Across the aisle there’s this guy about my age reading Murakami. Kafka on the Shore. I tell him it’s my favorite book. It isn’t. It doesn’t matter. I’ll never see him again. His big brown eyes smile at me as he tells me his name. I don’t return the favor and tell him mine. He starts talking anyway—Arlington, used to drive to Santa Fe, truck got sold, some story about his dad. It all sounds like something someone else would care about. He studies history at Harvard. Says he wants to write. Says he wants to teach. I don’t bother telling him where I go to school. His lips move in a soft, deliberate way and I notice myself noticing. Mother would call him a corn-fed Southern boy who can read which is supposed to be rare. Says he’s putting it all on hold while he works on a start-up. I feel something in me tighten, then give up. Start-up boys always talk like they’re auditioning for a commercial.

He tells me how he’s friends with Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s kid. How he gets coke for all the Harvard boys. He shrugs.

I look out the window. We’ve hit the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, or whatever counts as mountains out here. Brown slopes with scattered green. Bushes that look too small to matter. I’ve never seen a mountain before. And the Appalachians don’t count because I slept through them, drugged on Dramamine, trying not to throw up in the back seat. But that was years ago.

Later I’m in bed with the woman I brought on this trip. Or maybe She brought me; I can’t remember. I’m inside her, fingers moving, thumb pressing, the motion’s automatic, practiced. She moans. She moves. Wants something. I don’t.

Out the window there’s a cat walking along the top rail of a metal fence. Brown. Gray stripes. Too many toes. Stops. Licks a paw. Looks at me. It looks right at me. The bed creeks and the street hums.

She comes. Loudly. Says “Oh my GOD” like it’s an announcement. And my jeans on. Bag too. She’s still there in bed, smiling, moaning, or just breathing. I leave. The cat’s gone. Room smells like sweat and dust, nothing else.

I find the cat. It’s covered in fleas. Smells like piss and something metallic. Maybe blood. I make friends with him anyway. I name him Nasty Boy because it’s apt and because he isn’t going to correct me. He doesn’t talk, not like the Murakami cats, and I wonder if the boy on the train has gotten to the part with the talking one yet. I hope he has.

So, I sit with Nasty Boy in the courtyard of the Santa Fe International Hostel and read House of Incest to him. I bought the Nin the moment I saw the title, even though I didn’t know anything about it. The title was enough. Guests walk past and stare at the cat’s extra toes. Someone says something about how many there are. He mews in agreement.

Some guy tells this story about doing shrooms and watching the full moon rise last night. He says it was orange. The biggest he’s ever seen. Another guy. The right way to cook a potato. I listen to them both without responding. Nasty Boy stretches, then drops his whole weight on Nin, purring like this is the only place he is supposed to be.

The next day She takes me to a bug and reptile museum in a dead mall. Air feels stalled. Thick fluorescent light. Carpet hasn’t been cleaned in years. Rows of glass boxes glow in the dimness, terraria arranged like an attempt at order. Insects pulse inside, collected detritus of the desert, held for our eyes. She presses a lizard into my hands, cold and prehistoric. I hand it back after a moment and walk away. I find the stick bugs. Brown bodies sway in the phantom of wind. There’s a dozen, hundreds, maybe thousands in that box. A handler tells me they are all female. Says they make copies of themselves. Says reproduction is inevitable, automatic. They kill them sometimes to make room for more. Life generates itself into excess. I tell him it’s beautiful, though the word feels thin.

She returns with the same lizard cupped in Her hands. She has given it a name. I want one. I ask why. They can’t love, can’t learn their names. She looks at me like I am the one missing something. I can’t imagine what.

Everyone seems to go to bed early here, with one collective sigh exhaled and the town collapses in on itself. The businesses open from noon to seven. It feels more like a compromise than a schedule, as if time works differently this high and everyone adjusted without talking about it.

It's nine at night and the streets are empty, like a stage set and the actors have departed. Doors locked. Windows black. There’s nowhere to get a beer, nowhere to sit with strangers in a shared community of travel. I want a beer and to sit with Nasty Boy, feel the small hum of his body against my ankles. But he disappeared last night. Slipped into darkness like the rest of this town, quietly, without explanation.

I keep thinking I’ll see him when I turn a corner. Too many toes, piss-stained fur. He’ll look up at me with blank, necessary devotion. But night stays empty. Everything here vanishes as soon as you learn how to hold it. Sand falling between the cracks in my fingers.

The others at the hostel are discussing their dreams sitting around a fire. What if when you accomplish your dream, you are unaware of it? One asks. I don’t know. I tell him that I often dream that I am floating away—falling upwards. The world beneath me becomes a map I can’t read, and I wake up drenched in sweat, and it’s not the fear of falling but of being so high, of seeing it all. He nods and I think he gets it. He tells me his dream is to build sandcastles and live in them like some sandking.

In the plaza, downtown, I sit under one of the taller trees I’ve seen here. Taller here just means taller than most—most of the trees are stunted by the desert heat. It’s the first time I’ve gone downtown since arriving here. My main goal is to find a book shop. The book shops are different here too—more Marcel Proust and Gertrude Stein—maybe the people here are more literate. I found a café that I would frequent if I lived here. A place where I’d fall in love or find a weeklong distraction, whichever came first. Joy Harjo is doing a reading on Saturday, but I leave tomorrow. Timing is its own kind of punishment.

The plaza is the oldest part of the city. A little park—I’ve seen houses bigger. I am reading César Aira and it isn’t until I’ve just finished Bolaño’s introduction to the novel when I am interrupted by the noise of contemporary Christian pop music blasting through a Peavey PA in the middle of the plaza. I look towards the sound and spot seven children sporting karate outfits—black belts and all—convulsing in a choreographed seizure called dance to this abuse on my eardrums. One is dressed like Jesus. Another dressed in a black robe. They chase each other around a fountain. It’s religious psychosis masqueraded as family entertainment.

The first time I came to this city was on a mission trip my parents forced upon me. I was made to work on a radish farm for a week. What that had to do with being a good Christian was beyond me. I had lost my virginity to a hippie who smelled like patchouli and strawberries the week prior. We listened to the Grateful Dead in the woods and leaves stuck to his ass with sweat and cum. My parents said I was going down a wrong path as if there were only two and they held the map.

Something they don’t tell you: Alcohol hits harder up here; it lifts you too quickly. I’m stumbling through the Georgia O’Keeffe museum, letting the cool white walls hold me up. There is a plaque explaining how she despised the fact that people thought she was painting vaginas. I stare at the soft folds and impossible openings and can’t understand how it wasn’t on purpose.

In the back gallery there’s a shredded canvas, a piece she hated so violently she tore it from its frame and split it open, a wound blooming in the center. I stand in front of the ruin longer than I mean to. I think about going back to the hostel and tearing the pages out of my journal. Split words apart, create a gap large enough to walk through.

At a festival thirty minutes outside of town She follows me in my footsteps. Never once more than two feet away. Her proximity feels less like affection and more like a shadow I can’t shake. I don’t know how to tell Her I only want Her this close when we’re fucking, and even then, I’m thinking of leaving. Or maybe about someone else. Maybe the boy on the train. The truth is I don’t know how to want—no, that’s not it. I keep moving forward, hoping she will drift off on her own. She doesn’t.

She tells me my hair is the color of cinnamon. I want to thank Her, let myself be softened by the compliment. I really do. Instead, I say that Hers is the color of shit, no, almond, or maybe, chestnut. She laughs. I really wish She wouldn’t.

That night She reaches out for me again under the single sheet provided to cover our sweating bodies. And I let it happen because it’s easier than refusing. Stopping requires explanation. I stare at the box fan in the corner of room; its blades turning like a clock set to overdrive. The room smells wrong. I imagine a boys lips wrapped around me, not one in particular, just not Hers. When gasping for air she whispers my name and I let the fan fill my silence. When I return the favor between her legs, it feels borrowed, like I am filling in for myself. Afterwards, She presses the sweaty strands of Her bangs to my chest. She’s listening for something. The red meat of Her tongue licks up the mess in the coil of my pubes and I say I’m sorry, not loud enough to be heard.

I look for the cat again on the last morning, though I know he won’t be there. Stray things don’t return just because you want them too. The courtyard is empty except for a crushed beer can and a folding chair left overturned, like someone fled mid conversation. I sit anyway because leaving is slower than arriving. I think about Nasty Boy and the way he pushed his strange body against my legs. How his extra toes clicked on the concrete.

I tell myself I’ll come back, but as the breath leaves my lungs so does the lie dissolve. Some places only hold you once. The cat doesn’t return. I brush the dust off my jeans and walk to the train station.

The mountains look flatter on the way out, like someone turned the contrast down. She sleeps beside me with her mouth slightly open and I watch the small shrubs blur past. My phone buzzes with a text from a number I don’t recognize. Hey. Probably some boy or someone with the wrong number. I don’t answer. The sky is too blue. The air is too thin. Everything feels like it is happening two inches to the left. I close my eyes and pretend the motion is taking me somewhere I haven’t already been.