Cly-tem-nessss-tra

I'd been playing basketball at the rec center with a few other guys.  I played three games and lost them all, even though we kept changing the teams.  In the third game I'd gotten a rebound and tried to pass it out, but no one was where I passed it to and the ball flew into the pond and everyone else made me wade in and get it.  It wasn't that far in but it was the part of the pond where nobody swam and nobody dove in, so I didn't realize how deep it was -- how deep it was, I came to realize, was why nobody ever swam or dove in there.  Very quickly the water got above my waist.  After I got the ball out they wouldn't let me play anymore so I dried myself off with a sweatshirt I found in the back of the car and drove home.

I opened the garage door and there were two deer inside.  One with antlers, one without.  They were just standing in the spot where I needed to park my car, still and serene.  One of them was chewing on something, maybe just air.  I flashed my high beams at them but they didn't move.  I beeped.  They didn't seem too interested in going anywhere.

I backed away and closed them back in.  I didn't have a key, so I couldn't get into the house through the front door.  I drove down to Cumberland Farms and put a quarter in a sticky black payphone just a couple steps away from the gas tanks.  If something exploded, they would have swept me up in a dustpan.

My mom was out of town so I had to call my dad.

"I'm locked out of the house," I said.  "There are deer in the garage."

"What do you mean you're locked out of the house?"

"I don't have a key," I said.  "Should I leave the door open and let them out?"

"Don't leave anything open.  I'm down the road," he said.  "I'll be home in three hours."

"You can't come home before that?"

"No."  He hung up.

I checked on the deer.  They were still in there.  There were three now.  I'd closed the door, so I guess there had always been three.  I closed them back up.  I walked around the house looking for a window I could open or something, but they were all locked.

I walked over to Steve's.  His parents opened the door.  Both of them, for some reason, like they didn't have anything better to do than answer the door.

"Steve is over at Jen's," his mom said.

"He went with a few other people," his dad added.  "We figured you were over there too."

I hadn't been over at Jen's in a while.  It had been a couple weeks since we'd seen each other.  We were breaking up with each other, without confrontation, the easy way -- slow, like boiling a lobster.  Sometimes they go quietly and sometimes they start screaming and pounding on the side of the pot with their claws.

Lobsters, I mean.

But I was locked out and bored and embarrassed and I didn't have anywhere else to go.

Jen's mom answered the door.  She seemed a little surprised to see me.  "Everyone else just left," she said, "but Jen is down in the basement."

I stood there for a while, deciding what to do.  Jen's mom started to look a little worried.  A leaf blew through the door and she chased it down and picked it up and threw it outside.  "All right, I'll come in," I decided.

I shuffled down the stairs into the basement.  Jen was laying on the floor, with a sweatshirt over her eyes.  She had huge headphones over her ears, but they weren't plugged into anything -- the cord just coiled and died halfway to the wall.

She didn't move, she just groaned.

Who knows if she'd even known it was me, but she might have.  By this point we could identify each other by the sound of our steps on a staircase.

"There are deer in my garage," I said.

"I'm pregnant," she said.  The basement was finished, but everything still echoed down there.

"Well..."  I hadn't done anything with her that could get a person pregnant, so I felt ok.

She was wearing a Stone Cold Steve Austin shirt, a few sizes too big for her.  It was probably her brother's, although he was smaller than she was.  The front said "FUCK FEAR," with a skull in place of the U, so it kind of looked like it said "FOCK."  I think the back said "DRINK BEER," but I couldn't see it.

"I'm not pregnant," she said.  "That was a test."

"How'd I do then?"

"It was one of those tests that doesn't have an answer."  She slapped the floor with her hand, like, come on over.

I sat down next to her.  She traced my arm with her fingertips, then shook them out, like something'd stuck.

"What were you guys doing?" I asked.

"Blowing each other," she said.  "Skateboarding.  Playing video games."

"What video games do you have?"

She groaned again.  "I can never tell when you're kidding," she said.  I didn't really know if I was kidding either.  I tried to look into her eyes, meaningfully, if possible, but she wouldn't take the shirt off her face.

"Want me to turn off a light or something?"

"The light isn't the problem," she said.  "The problem is all these fucking objects."

"I could clean up a little if you want."

"That's good, thank you.  Keep saying things that seem like they would make sense."  It made me a little scared, the way she said it.  "For once your rock-headed literalism is helpful."

"I need to use the bathroom," I said.

"All the downstairs bathrooms aren't working," she said.  "You'd have to use the one in my parents' bedroom."

It didn't seem worth it.  I moved a little closer to her, so I could feel her arm on my leg, but she flinched politely and moved just far enough away to be not touching.

"Do you want to see the deer?" I asked.

"All right," she said.  "I don't want to take this shirt off my eyes, though."

"You can take my hand and I'll lead you up to the car."

"Yeah right."

"Fine, then just follow me."

She staggered over to the stairs behind me and pulled herself up with the handrail.  Her parents were in the kitchen when we got upstairs and they glared at me but they didn't say anything.  Jen felt her way over to the front door with one hand on the wall and one hand keeping the sweatshirt over her eyes.

I let her out onto the front porch.  "Don't you want shoes?" I asked.  She was barefoot and they had a gravel driveway.  But she didn't answer, she just stepped down onto the rocks and stepped slowly over to where she figured I'd parked.  I directed her a little bit but she wouldn't have let me touch her to guide her over, so I didn't try.

I started the car and she flipped on the radio.  She knew how the stations were programmed, which I didn't.

"Why don't you take that thing off your face?" I asked.

"I don't want to."

"You're going to have to at some point."

"No I'm not," she said.  "I'm going to claw my eyes out like Clytemnestra."

"That was Oedipus," I said.  "Who's Clytemnestra?"

"Cly-tem-nessss-tra," she said.

We pulled into my driveway and I opened the garage door.  The three deer were still inside, but they were dead.  I stopped the car and got out and checked on them.  They didn't have any bruises or injuries.  I thought they must have gotten into a can of paint or something and poisoned themselves, but I couldn't find anything like that.

Jen was still sitting in her seat.  I opened her door.

"They died," I said.

"Who died?"

"The deer."

"How'd they die?"  Her head was tilted up because she couldn't see where I was, so I was talking to the underside of her chin.

"I don't know.  They must have suffocated, although I don't know how, it's not like the garage is airtight."

"Maybe they just died," she said.

"I guess."

She peeked out from under her shirt, pushing it down sort of over her mouth.  "Where are they?"

I brought her over to see them.  We stood there for a couple seconds, then she picked up a basketball and tried to dribble it, but it was flat, so she just rolled it out the door behind her, onto the grass at the side of the driveway.

I started dragging one of the deer out of the garage.

"What are you doing with that thing?"

"I don't know."

"You should bring it down to the ol' general store," she said.  "You should barter it for some lye and wax and pelts."

"What?"

"You should cut it open and live inside it.  I'll live inside it.  Both of us, together.  We can make a home of it."

"I guess I'll just drag it into the woods."  Its legs were stiff, which made it easier to hold onto.  Jen went over to one of the other ones and started dragging it out behind me.  I told her I'd do it, but she kept dragging.  She was wearing the sweatshirt around her neck now, tied up like one of those circle scarves.

The deer were weight, heavy weight.  Like gravity worked twice as strong on something dead.  In truth, I was just tired, and deer were probably just heavier than I'd ever given them credit for.

We dragged the third one into the woods together, two legs each.  After that Jen walked off.  I tried to figure out how best to pile them up.  The woods were pretty shallow where we'd dumped them -- the neighbors would definitely see them when they walked out to their car.  It would have taken too much thought to figure out a better way.  The deer were dumped -- that was good enough for now.  At least now I could park.

We'd dragged them right over some of my dad's flowers, I noticed.  He'd be mad about that.  He'd probably tell me how I should have done it -- how I should have chopped up their bodies and put the parts in a suitcase or something like that, making it seem like I was an idiot because I didn't know the proper way to drag a dead deer out of the garage, like, how did I really think I was going to last fifteen minutes in college?

Jen was gone by the time I turned around and stepped out of the woods.  Her sweatshirt was balled up in the middle of the driveway.  I picked it up and got in the car and threw the shirt in the front seat.  I pulled out onto the road and the streetlights snapped on with a shock and a buzz of dumb, blaring, wasted energy.  I figured I'd find her on the road and pick her up and drive her the rest of the way.  I drove back and forth between my place and hers three times, but I couldn't find her.