Talking animals, p.20
Talking Animals, page 20
Pamella purred in fruit reverie.
“But little by little coffee began to replace the other crops. At first, we hardly noticed, but then the coffee owners began to want more. They wanted everything. Our whole community moved, but the landowners also wanted the place we moved to. This process continued until we wound up pushed to the coast.”
“Is that when you came here?” Alfonzo asked.
“No, no. First the comedy had to get worse. There was a scandal. The president was lining his bank accounts with coffee money. And despite all the land deals, the treasury was a hollow shell. I remember how angry my father was. He was a citizen, he fumed. He was a respectable lemur who obeyed the law, but this was too much. He went out onto the streets to join the animal masses. They stampeded to the presidential palace to protest against coffee. A snap election was called. We rejoiced. The opposition party gained a wave of followers when they promised—they swore on their mothers’ bones—that a vote for them was a vote against coffee.”
“What happened?”
“The opposition won. We believed that this time we, the regular animals, had won. The coffee growers were compelled to leave. My mother dared to suggest that we might return to our home territory. The new party seemed to be keeping their word until they quietly began to roll out a new plan. The coffee lands would be replanted with tea. The economy would run on tea, which they assured us was much healthier and more patriotic. ‘Tea is not coffee,’ the new president beamed from the TV sets, and no one could say he was lying.”
Alfonzo couldn’t breathe right. The coffee-shop air smelled of yeast, pipe tobacco, and malt. It smelled of owners’ houses and pickers’ shacks. It smelled of chocolate and dung and matted earth and scented candles.
“But then what was the point? Didn’t you feel hopeless?” Alfonzo asked.
“What else were we going to do but struggle?” Pamella replied. “It’s a choice between hope and hopelessness. We aren’t against the mayor because we support his opponents. We don’t want tea as a solution to coffee, or pig proposals to solve horse problems. If a seal were to somehow become the mayor according to the rules as they are now, that wouldn’t be victory. The struggle has always been life and death, I suppose, but it feels different now, in that we—you and I and everyone we care for—we won’t have a home that’s not underwater, we won’t have un-poisoned food or air if we don’t struggle. Some say the rich will feel the rising seas, too, but you can be sure they’ll be the last to get wet, by which time it will be too late for the rest of us. We can’t keep running in their hamster wheel.”
The bell above the door tinkled.
A llama walked into the café, and it was Mitchell. He wore sunglasses despite the lack of sun and a gray scarf wrapped all the way up to meet the bucket hat that covered his ears. This was his disguise for the City Hall goons who didn’t seem to be looking for him. He was a beautiful, absurd creature. The three were happy to be reunited. Alfonzo sniffed away his sadness as Pamella embraced Mitchell’s long neck. Their friendship was so fragile and necessary.
Mitchell said they should take a walk to be out in the weather.
Pamella wrote a note, BACK SOON!, and taped it to the door. They left the music playing and the lights on and ambled out onto the street.
* * *
The clouds above were black and blue and gray all over, low as they arrived from the north. Most of all, the clouds were wet. The snow they’d been producing had turned to something else, a shifting foggy rain. The snow had become an explosion of particles too insubstantial to bother with gravity.
The city followed the weather’s lead. Greasy steam burst from exhaust vents. Workers puffed on break-time cigarettes. Their smoke rushed upward to join its god, the clouds. Tires sliced puddles, and the sprays hit pedestrians who were wielding umbrellas as shields. The mist caught in fur and feathers and soaked them through. Animals leapt to stay dry-footed, but it was futile. Water streamed down the glass-and-steel cliffs and through the concrete valleys. Frigid pools formed around storm drains. Alfonzo dodged custodians sweeping water toward the street with long squeegees. Particles flew into his eyes. He blinked and sputtered.
Mitchell strolled along with Pamella on his back, cool and collected, as if they were stars in some broken version of Singin’ in the Rain.
Alfonzo recalled the storms of seasons before and the strange, festive mood that would precede them. Everyone turned giddy with the fear of the clouds. He remembered the sandbags heaped around buildings, wood blocking windows, water blurring windshields. He remembered his mother’s frail voice over the phone saying they were fine and the restful quality of darkness that fell across the river after that transformer exploded. We have already heard of what’s coming, he thought. The music has already begun.
Into the fancy vestibules of finance buildings the water crept. The water took the cracks and hung on to coats and tails. It slicked across elevator floors and evaporated once inside, steaming up the windows. Droplets sank into carpets in solidarity with the waves that beat against the island’s edges. The ice melted, and as it did it sang its song of praise and mourning.
The water would continue to come and go, advancing and retreating at the moon’s urging forever. This was not a threat, it was a promise. This was not a battle, just a rhythm.
How long it takes to navigate this tiny fragment of land—eons, perhaps. Mitchell and Pamella whispered and joked between themselves and Alfonzo trailed behind. They wandered past the bull and all the way to the foot of the Museum of the American Indian. They did nothing to distinguish themselves from the tourists or the other locals. Everyone was wet and therefore vulnerable. We who are fragile must become willing to change form even as our purpose remains constant, Alfonzo hummed. They allowed themselves to just belong. They turned east, taking Beaver to Wall, Wall to Water, then finally passed beneath FDR Drive and reached Pier 11.
Under a curve of decorative metal meant to evoke the prow of a ship was a booth, and in the booth crouched a ticket-seller cat dressed in an orange raincoat. She gave them news of the next ferry, which would sail for Brooklyn. It was 11:00 a.m. now. Their ship would arrive at any moment. Mitchell, Pamella, and Alfonzo thanked her for the good word, and the damp cat scowled from beneath her hood.
This city bobbed and swayed. The wide river, the tidal strait, and the salty waters of the sound hummed in concert. So many millions of creatures lived across this archipelago. They were alive right then in their vulnerable habitat, but it could all just disappear. Alfonzo was not up for the catastrophe. He was just a dumb animal making noises. Thinking of his father, remembering his mother, marveling over all those he loved, he saw his city. Anything can be a boat as long as it floats.
Praise the craft, Alfonzo hummed. Praise the shoreline and the harbor. Praise this island with its pizza joints and its music clubs open late. Praise the wounded families who struggle. Praise friends and their couches lent for sleeping when it was not possible to sleep at home. Praise the employed and unemployed, the infirm and the well. Praise the steep hills of the Bronx, the oddly numbered streets of Queens, and the ponds of Brooklyn, blue-green with algae. Praise the animals and the storm which envelopes them. Praise today, what has passed, and all that is to come.
They huddled together in this blur of water dust. It was not snow or hail or rain or wintry mix, it was just water that had been circling the Earth for a long time, taking many forms. The unnameable mist enfolded the llama, the lemur, and the alpaca. Out in the river they saw the outline of the ferry becoming more solid as the boat approached the land.
They felt happy without knowing why.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Since the first flickerings of this book, I have been the beneficiary of so much support. Writing arises out of, and feeds into, my relationships with others. Friends and strangers have engaged in conversations and shared nuanced feedback, anecdotes, and their best puns. They not only humored but also took seriously my insatiable desire for animal talk. I only hope I have done their collective and individual brilliance some justice. It takes a herd.
Thank you, Allison Devereaux, Jeremy M. Davies, Deborah Ghim, Alexis Nowicki, Devon Mazzone, and everyone else at FSG for the expert shepherding. Working with you has been a dream and I feel beyond lucky.
Thank you, Erin Robinsong; Stephanie Acosta; Erin Dowding; Tricia Middleton; Caroline Picard; Aaron Boothby; Lani Hanna; Sara Clugage; Kristi McGuire; Cat Tyc; Bett Williams; Elizabeth Callaghan; Daniel, Paul, and Joanna Mehrer; Steve Cooper; Banoo Lashai; Josh Peskowitz; Sophie Harris; Corey Frost; Jacob Wren; Chris Kraus; Lisa Locascio; and Ariana Reines. Thank you, Eugene Lim, for the book’s title and for such generous literary guidance and encouragement. Thank you to Maya Smelof, Andy Matinog, and all my fellow students at Red Crow Yoga Shala. Thank you to all the animals I have known, but especially Z-Bat, Greycat and Chicken, Toulouse, Fiona, and Alfons.
Deepest gratitude and love to my family, Geri Murphy, Jessi Hazard, Ruby and Opal Campbell, and my father, Bruce Blevins, who passed on to another plane during the writing of this book, yet remains present and powerful.
And finally, endless love to Rob Callaghan, without whom this book would not exist. It was from him I first learned of Mitchell-Lama housing, which was the door to a labyrinth, and he has been with me in it ever since. He is a consummate and kind New Yorker, an artist in worker’s clothing, and a comrade in the most profound sense.
ALSO BY JONI MURPHY
Double Teenage
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joni Murphy is from New Mexico and lives in New York. Her debut novel, Double Teenage, was published in 2016 and was named one of The Globe and Mail’s 100 Best Books of the year. You can sign up for email updates here.
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPHS
THE FIVE BURROWS
UTOPIA OF RULES
ENCLOSURE
HORSE AND SPARROWS
ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE
BENEATH THE BEACH
SARDINES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ALSO BY JONI MURPHY
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
FSG Originals
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2020 by Joni Murphy
All rights reserved
First edition, 2020
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint “In the Dark Times,” originally published in German in 1939 as “Motto: In den finsteren Zeiten,” translated by Tom Kuhn. Copyright © 1976, 1961 by Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag, from Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-72131-2
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Joni Murphy, Talking Animals
