“The water?”
“Hot as a bath. I crawled in on my knees and then pushed myself off the ledge toward the middle.”
If his feet were close to skimming the bottom, he never knew, for the gator had been expecting him in her pond the moment he slid down the curve of the hill. She smelled his panic. Her senses were sharpened by millennia, and she knew him better than he knew himself.
He thought she was a boat. His mind rationalized that some asshole had his boat out on the retention pond behind an Italian restaurant on a Wednesday night. He thought he must have been hit by a boat. Such was the force upon which they met. Meadow wanted to know when he knew there was an alligator holding onto his hand in the dark. Meadow wanted to know if he opened his eyes under the water. Meadow was almost too stoned and losing her legs. She kept standing and sitting back down in her brother’s lopsided computer chair.
He caught a glimpse of the alligator’s eye in the moon and made out the shape of her enormous head resting on his hand. She looked right at him, and he saw nothing there but himself. On one side of him it was all scales and teeth and on the other, just black water.
“Pain is a human concept. It didn’t hurt until they pulled me back into their world. She and I—the alligator—we went to a place beyond that. Past pain.”
“Pulled back? You were on the bank.”
“I was under with her the whole time.”
“Dad told me you were up on the bank when they found you. You were bleeding on the grass. Daddy told me that.”
“Bullshit. That’s how they add ‘sense’ into something that makes no sense…can’t believe that asshole’s lying.”
But Meadow didn’t want Christopher to get ahead of himself and the alligator. She was still clumsy with the lighter sometimes, so her brother leaned forward and ignited the bowl for her.
It seemed like there were hundreds of alligators, he told her. He thought he was in a sea of them. Above and below. Once attached, she readjusted her bite for better grip. He complied. Thus, the blood began to flow. Her teeth were numerous and thick, but they were blunt, and for just a moment, she held him there between her jaws. Christopher found the weight of her mouth to be a great comfort. He thought that if she were to let go, he might just slip away. They floated together, suspended.
“We were side-by-side in the water,” said Christopher. “That’s how it felt. Her body was on mine, and I lost track of me, but we were connected. I wasn’t lost.” He shrugged. “She felt long enough to reach across the pond and then past that.”
“Did you try to push it off you? Hit it?”
Her brother sounded like he was pulled from the edge of sleep. “Uh, maybe, but no, I don’t think so. She like then, um. She went totally like…” Christopher waved his only hand, glowing in the dark—a ghost, a lost twin, searching for the word. “Uh, you know, like went slack.” He nodded to himself. “She went slack so I knew what was coming. It was like before you dream, and you think you’re falling. She rolled.”
Heat lightning illuminated the sky and they both looked to the window. In that brief, hot glow, she saw the silver flash all the way to the end. The slant of the twin palms in their backyard, backlit against the sheen of the chain fencing, sectioning and separating the yards. The dusky ripple of their neighbor’s pool, and then further, over the slope of the low hills, and nestled into the curve of the Earth: the orange groves. The scent of the fruit and of the soil carried on the breeze. She saw it there, all in the flash of lightning. Already cloaked in darkness again, and her mind was making out lines, trying to save it all.
The thieving hand slipped right off. Like a glove, didn’t even hurt. In the end, it didn’t matter much at all. He would have given her his whole arm. He would have offered it gladly, so long as it enabled him to keep holding on, as she spun and spun. He remembered little of this, but he did remember thinking briefly of his bed, and how perhaps there was a version of himself there, in that same moment. His faraway bed, the perfumed smell of their grandmother’s closet, chalk-smeared boards, how the past Christmas was 83 degrees.