'No more!' He threw her outside. She fell hard on her buttocks, and before she could get up, he threw her pails out after her. They bounced and clattered across the concrete.
He slammed the door, locked it.
He threw himself down on the couch, opened the paper and started looking through the classified ads.
Ray glanced down at the small square of newspaper in his hand:
GUESTROOM:
He looked up at the address on the side of the apartment building. This was it. 1443 Sherwood. He smiled. It was even better than he'd expected. He'd known that this address was in the nicest section of town, and he'd expected it to be well kept, but he hadn't thought it would be this nice. He walked through the wrought iron gates and looked down at the freestanding map of the complex in the entryway, finding number seven.
It was upstairs, and he walked alongside the wide banister, around the corner, until he found the right doorway. He stood there for a moment, looking down at the manicured shrubbery, at the blue swimming pool.
He knocked on the door.
The smell assaulted his nostrils the moment the door opened: the clean scent of flour and sugar. He looked past the smiling man who stood in the vestibule. The floor of the apartment was covered with wet dough, as were the walls. In the center of the room was a barbed wire pen, and in the pen a snorting, snuffing creature that looked almost like a pig.
Almost, but not quite.
'As you can see,' the man said, gesturing toward the pen,
'it's just my sister and me—'
'I'll take it,' Ray said.
Llama
'Llama' was basically my response to astrology, numerology, and those sorts of pseudo-sciences. I wanted to show that patterns can exist, can recur, in nature, in society, and not necessarily mean anything. In the story, the protagonist's wife and unborn child died during the act of childbirth, and this man sees patterns everywhere, in everything, telling him what to do to avenge those deaths. The patterns might exist, but a lot of them are coincidence and have meaning only in the guy's head. They have no real objective meaning at all. That's how I feel about the fortune-telling arts.
When I wrote this story, there really was a llama living across the alley from my friend Dan Cannon's bookstore.
_________________________
Measuring:
The leg of the dead llama was three feet, two inches long.
And everything fell into place.
Three feet, two inches was the precise length of space between the sole of my hanging father's right foot and the ground.
By the time my wife's contractions were three minutes I and two seconds apart, she had only dilated 3.2 centimeters and the decision was made to perform a caesarean.
My wife was declared dead at three twenty.
The date was March 20.
I found the llama in the alley behind the bookstore. It was already dead, its cataract eyes rimmed with flies, and the retarded boy was kneeling on the rough asphalt beside it, massaging its distended stomach. The presence of the retarded boy told me that secrets lay within the measurements of the dead animal, perhaps the answers to my questions, and I quickly rushed back inside the store to find a tape measure.
In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt bought a new Ford coupe. The license plate of the coupe, which Roosevelt never drove, was 3FT2.
My father voted for Franklin Roosevelt.
I thought I saw my wife's likeness in a stain in the toilet in the men's room of an Exxon station. The stain was greenish black and on the right side of the bowl.
I breathed upon the mirror above the blackened sink, and sure enough, someone had written her name on the glass. The letters appeared—clear spots in the fog cloud of condensation—then faded.
In the trash can, partially wrapped in toilet paper, I saw what looked like a bloody fetus.
I left the llama in the alley undisturbed, did not tell the police or any city authority, and I warned the other shop owners on the block not to breathe a word about the animal to anyone.
I spent that night in the store, sleeping in the back office behind the bookshelves. Several times during the night I awakened and looked out the dusty window to where the un-moving body lay on the asphalt. It looked different in the shadows created by moonlight and streetlamp, and in the lumped silhouette I saw contours that were almost familiar to me, echoes of shapes that I knew had meant something to me in the past but which now remained stubbornly buried in my subconscious.
I knew the dead animal had truths to tell.
Weighing:
The hind end of the llama, its head and upper body still supported by the ground, weighed one hundred and ninety-six pounds.
My dead wife's niece told me that she was sixteen, but I believe she was younger.
I have a photograph of her, taken in a booth at an amusement park, that I keep on the top of my dresser, exactly 3.2 inches away from a similar photo of my wife.
The photo cost me a dollar ninety-six. I put eight quarters into the machine, and when I happened to check the coin return I found four pennies.
My father weighed a hundred and ninety-six pounds at his death. He died exactly a hundred and ninety-six years after his great-great-grandfather first set foot in America. My father's great-great-grandfather hanged himself.
A hundred and ninety-six is the sum total of my age multiplied by four—the number of legs of the llama.
***
The Exxon station where I saw my wife's likeness in a stain in the men's room toilet is located at 196 East 32nd Street.
I do not remember whose idea it was to try the pins. I believe it was hers, since she told me that she'd recently seen a news report on acupuncture that interested her.
I showed her some of the books in my store: the photographic essay on African boys disfigured by rites of passage, the illustrated study of Inquisition torture devices, the book on deformed strippers in an Appalachian sideshow.
She told me that if acupuncture needles placed on the proper nerves could deaden pain, wasn't it logical to assume that needles placed on other nerves could stimulate pleasure?
She allowed me to tie her up, spread-eagled on the bed, and I began by inserting pins in her breasts. She screamed, at first yelling at me to stop, then simply crying out in dumb animal agony. I pushed the pins all the way into her flesh until only the shiny round heads were visible, pressing them slowly through the skin and the fatty tissue of her breasts in a crisscross pattern, then concentrating them around the firmer nipples.
By the time I had moved between her legs, she had passed out and her body was covered all over with a thin shiny sheen of blood.
When the retarded boy finished massaging the llama's distended stomach, he stepped back from the animal and stood there soundlessly. He looked at me and pointed to the ground in front of him. I measured the space between the retarded boy and the llama. Five feet, six inches.
At the time my father hanged himself he was fifty-six years old.
My stillborn son weighed five pounds, six ounces.
Five times six is thirty.
My wife was thirty years old when she died.
According to the book
