Dr. Moreau’s Pet Shop

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“Is there such a thing as being ‘fresh out of rehab’ when it’s your sixth time?” Annabelle asked as she settled into the bucket seat of her convertible, coaching the B-list reporters who followed her after she’d signed herself out of the facility. “Maybe say ‘rotten out of rehab’ or ‘spoiled.’ Or ‘stale’. . . ‘Stale out of rehab Annabelle Hadley.'”

Which, in her condo, where an odor of something neglected in the refrigerator lingered, was exactly how she felt: stale, and detached from the thickened figure facing her in her bedroom mirror. She wouldn’t even try to lose the rehab donut weight this time. There seemed no point in whittling herself down to a self so easily condemnable. With less effort she could crop her hair, maybe brutally short; the new look would match the voice that countless cigarettes had scrubbed into a growl.

Annabelle’s court-ordered abstinence from outside communication was over, and her agent had left word about a job on her voice mail: “P. P. Frederico is remaking The Island of Dr. Moreau as a full length animated feature. He wants you to voice a character named ‘M’ling.’ I told him you’d be thrilled.”

Annabelle hadn’t been so sure. She’d seen enough has-been actresses lose themselves in the world of animation: usually they’d be animals-gloriously feathered and distinctively beaked birds, sinuously-waisted minks, cobras hooded like Cleopatra-that were all sad memorials to faded careers. She’d be turned into a cat, Annabelle guessed, with huge green eyes, a whiskey purr, and a slender body. For a cartoon no one needed to trim down, either by exercise or diet pills or a finger down the throat.

A Moreau script was delivered, but Annabelle didn’t bother to read it. She knew the story-a crazy doctor on a remote island operates on animals, trying to turn them into human beings. Her character’s name, M’ling, hinted at a wickedly seductive antagonist, maybe with a vaguely threatening Middle Eastern allure. Too late in the arc of her reputation to give her voice to a heroine.

It wasn’t until the telephone interview arranged by the studio a week before recording was to start that Annabelle discovered what she’d gotten herself into. The interview began with the usual questions about her rehab stint and her legal trouble. Did she think she’d stay sober this time? Would she think twice again before leaving the scene of an accident? Would she consider an apology to PETA and the vegan coalition she had enraged with her observation that “only stupid people don’t eat meat-meat, including brains, is brain food. Even zombies know that.” Curled up on her bed in sweatpants and a too-snug T-shirt from her own “Scaredy Cat” line for tweens, she watched herself yawn and smoke in her dresser mirror as she asserted her “every confidence and hope” that her new sobriety would lead to better future decisions. Annabelle considered herself adept at deflecting awkward questions provocatively yet insubstantially; when asked what she thought PETA’s take on her involvement with Frederico’s Moreau project would be, she saw the languorous drag she took from her cigarette and the careful way she patted the bed around her hips for the Snickers bar she’d half unwrapped before the call. She could still mesmerize herself with her own eyes, though at the moment they were no more bewitching than frozen peas. And when had her chin begun to melt into her neck?

“It’s just a cartoon,” she said. “No animals, I can assure you, will be harmed during filming.”

The reviewer chuckled. “Right. But since Frederico has already commented on his intentions of releasing this as the first graphically violent cartoon in the history of cinema-“shocking,” I think was the word he used, do you get the feeling you were cast because of your comments on meat?”

Annabelle watched her brow furrow, thought “worry,” and deepened the frown. Cigarette ash dropped onto her chest into the open green eye of her T-shirt’s winking “Scaredy Cat” logo. The identical logo was tattooed in color on the small of her back.

“You mean do I think it’s unusual for a filmmaker to inspire interest in his film by introducing a note of controversy?”

“Animals surgically altered-torn apart by Dr. Moreau and reconstructed as humanoids-deformed, suffering creatures treated first as experiments, than as slaves by the evil doctor.” The reporter seemed to be reading this from a press release.

“What cartoon doesn’t tear apart animals and make them half human? Mickey Mouse and Goofy and Bugs-they’re freaks, right? Talking biped animals.  Bipedophiles-is that a word?”

“No-but the film’s theme seems to glorify suffering-”

“It’s a horror cartoon. And I like meat.”

“Hmm. Well, are you put off by the absence of a female presence in the film?”

“I’m M’ling.”

“Right.” The interviewer waited. Annabelle traced a circle around her reflected face with her cigarette butt. She imagined herself with a snout and protruding yellow teeth, shivered, and looked away.

“Well, I’m sure that some suppressed sexual tension will bubble to the surface-isn’t that what horror films are all about these days-red-lipped vampires burying their fangs into the necks of- ”

“Of course, but how do you feel about the fact that M’ling is a male?”

“Excuse me?”

“How do you feel about the fact that for your first role in almost four years, you’ve been cast as a male?”

Annabelle pictured her script, still in its Fedex envelope in the center of her black granite kitchen island. “Um-” She wouldn’t surrender the truth-that her career was in the toilet and this was the only job she’d been offered.  “-I’m sure it’s integral to the film. Mr. Frederico is an artist, and a certain liberation from convention should be-expected. Are we almost over? My publicist is pointing at her watch. I think I have an appearance at a charity event scheduled.” Annabelle watched the figure in her mirror tap her wrist.

“Just one thing more. How do you feel about the fact that Carl Walchuk is responsible for the screenplay? You know the Moreau project originated with his father, right?  The production is something like a memorial to Raymond Walchuk. He gave P. P. Frederico his start, after all. Do you know Carl?”

“Not really. Maybe we met at some child star thing twenty years ago, before he quit acting.  I don’t remember if he was on the set of Svidrigaylov’s Dream, if that’s what you’re getting at. That whole mess with his father got settled, and everybody involved moved on. Raymond Walchuk died years ago. I’ve really got no comment beyond that.”

After the interview, Annabelle shrugged back on her pillows and shut her eyes. Raymond Walchuk, the filmmaker responsible for Svidrigaylov’s Dream. Who would try to make such a movie? Who would cast an eight year old as the object of a perverted Russian noble’s nightmare, choosing the little girl whose features were most precociously adult?  It hadn’t been difficult to transform her into a dream-whore.  But what responsible director would emphasize to the child that the goat-bearded character imagining her was “thinking fucky-fucky”? All done for the sake of art, Raymond Walchuk argued when her parents brought a civil suit against him for attempting to corrupt a minor. The settlement and publicity had ruined him, and, paradoxically, launched Annabelle Hadley’s career. She had been the winner. There were long stretches, months at a time, when she didn’t think about being the little girl of Svidrigaylov’s Dream, the movie that was never finished; but, when she was conscious of being, she was never anyone else.

The chicken or the egg? The life that followed-a few family movies and teen romps, G and PG, then a love affair with drugs, with older actors, male and female celebrities of similarly tattered reputations, raunchy paparazzi photographs, moments when she glimpsed her own mascara-ringed eyes or caught a whiff of her cigarette breath or the fermented smell of bodily fluids she only half-remembered sharing. It hadn’t taken long for the butterfly to revert to a worm that had a love-hate relationship with the spotlight’s shriveling heat.

Her parents should have known, Raymond Walchuk maintained. Had they been so eager for their daughter to succeed that they had at first ignored the obvious subject of Svidrigaylov’s Dream? Hadn’t they read the script? Weren’t they familiar with Crime and Punishment? And now Mom and Dad lived snugly and advice-less on the edge of a Palm Springs golf course, while Annabelle found herself marooned on The Island of Doctor Moreau– in another of Raymond Walchuk’s fantasies.

*****

Annabelle finally read the Moreau screenplay. There was a note that the description of her character M’ling had been transcribed directly from H. G. Wells’s novel: “a misshapen man, short, broad, and clumsy, with a crooked back, a hairy neck, and a head sunk between his shoulders. He . . . had peculiarly thick, coarse, black hair . . . the black face was a singularly deformed one. The facial part projected, forming something dimly suggestive of a muzzle, and the huge half-open mouth showed . . . big white teeth.”

The story seemed pointlessly grim and violent-live animals torn apart by Moreau and reconfigured as gruesome humanoids. It was a story of degeneration and madness; there wasn’t a shred of redemption or hope in it. As a cartoon, maybe it would develop a cult following among the morbid, but it was nothing but a grim, gratuitously violent slaughterhouse, in spite of its Victorian era pedigree.  When Annabelle called her agent to tell him she wanted out, he pooh-poohed her.

“Classy author, classy connections. You need a touch of class. It’s P. P. Frederico! And now is not the time to quit smoking, if you’re thinking about it. Your voice is your signature now. There’s a fortune in cartoons and commercials.”

*****

Annabelle’s dangling legs ached, and her ass had cramped from sitting for almost two hours on a rung-less stool. Her headphones pinched her ears, and her scalp was sweating under her new buzz cut. On the screen in front of her, a human-ish blob haunted a glimmering vacancy. Her voice would aid its transformation into M’ling. She wouldn’t see the completely realized character until the film’s premiere.

She had just delivered her sixteenth take of her first line: “They-won’t have me forward.” M’ling, the only one of Moreau’s “transformed” animals to be trusted as a house servant, was being abused by sailors on a ship transporting fresh animals to the mad doctor’s island.

“Ms. Hadley-” P. P. Frederico’s words buzzed like hornets in her headphones- “according to Mr. Walchuk’s faithful transcription from the original text, M’ling should deliver this line ‘slowly, with a queer, hoarse quality in his voice.’ You’ve captured the ‘hoarse’-but that’s just your natural rasp. Where’s the ‘queer’? Once again, please.”

Annabelle craved a cigarette, but no break seemed imminent. “They-won’t have me forward,” she said for the seventeenth time.

“Ms. Hadley. Annabelle. What does ‘queer’ mean to you?”

“‘Queer’? Annabelle had made a dozen films and had never repeated a line more than four times. And this was just a god-damned  cartoon. “For Wells it would have meant ‘strange,’ right? ‘Weird.’ But there’s a lot of ‘weirds.’ I think you need to tell me a little more of what you’re after.”

“‘To you, to you, to you. To you. To. You-‘ I said. M’ling’s words don’t belong to H. G. Wells any longer. They’re ours, and we’re in the 21^st century.  What does ‘queer’ mean to you?”

“Hunh,” Annabelle sighed. To-yoo-to-yoo-to-yoo.  Frederico, the bird man. If she turned she’d see him through the glass wall of the control booth, his face surrounded by feather-petals, pecking at his microphone with a tiny beak. On the screen in front of her the gingerbread man blob standing in for her character floated impassively, waiting for her voice. Queer? A Youtube video gone viral flashed through her mind: a kiss-less kiss, really, than glottal assault-she’d shared with a one hit pop nymphette. Annabelle remembered the video clip, but not the actual kiss. She looked at the M’ling-blob waiting for her answer.  “‘Queer’ means ‘gay’ to me,” she growled into her microphone.

“Exactly! Could you lend something of your new understanding to your characterization, please? Oh-wait a minute-visitors-take five. Hello, Carl-and how’s our little man?” Annabelle heard a click and dead air. She plucked off her headphones and slid from the stool. She stamped the pins and needles out of her numb legs before hurrying out for a cigarette.

*****

They won’t have me forward. Annabelle sat on the hood of her lipstick red convertible in the parking lot of the sound studio, trying to enjoy a second cigarette she’d lit from her first. Her fingers shook from nerves or anger or nicotine. I’m keeping my voice in shape, she thought as the smoke burned through her throat and filled her lungs. She’d been sober for weeks. Two. The truth was, cigarettes were her only craving. She tried to remember what her other urges had felt like.  A haze Annabelle imagined rising from the united efforts of all the city’s smokers absorbed the distant hills. Queer wasn’t one of her words-it didn’t measure her liberal attitude toward her own sexual proclivities or history, clips of which swam through the stew of her memory along with the Youtube kiss.

Annabelle thought harder, surprising herself with a desire to understand P. P. Frederico. Her character M’ling had been carved by Moreau into human form from what? A dog? He’d suffered a kind of extractive rape, torn from one body, one species, into another. Forced to fit an idea of “human.” Dragged from a natural self into an isolating “otherness.” They won’t have me forward. Annabelle felt an unexpectedly sensual swelling behind her eyes-she wasn’t far from tears. Poor, queer M’ling. How cruel of Moreau to have thrust him into the human condition.

“P.P. says you’re doing great.” A young man pushing a blond toddler in a stroller had passed through the glass doors of the sound studio lobby and now stood squinting at Annabelle through the milky sunshine. Not eager for company, she pretended that it was the child who had spoken. The toddler was sunk deep into the stroller’s seat, and his limp arms and legs hung from his stubby torso like the appendages of a sock monkey. He’d fixed her with a pale-eyed gaze that seemed to insist on an apology. What if, she wondered, what if this little boy was dying, what if his brief life was ebbing away with each heartbeat? She mewed with relief when the child hurled his doll, a naked, flaxen-haired Barbie, toward her. It was a healthy toss. The doll struck the headlight next to Annabelle’s knee and fell face down onto the blacktop. Annabelle caught her breath and choked up a cough that turned into sobs. Two heaves, and a third, before she bowed into her shoulder, smothering her tears. “Sorry,” she said. “Wrong pipe.”

The young man, who was not robust, had rolled the stroller closer, leaning on it as if it were a walker. Though his hair and eyes were dark, the shape of his head and the tilt of his posture were identical to the child’s. “Pipes can be ornery,” he said. He waited for her to compose herself. “P. P.’s isn’t always able to communicate his needs. He wants me to tell you to give M’ling a little lisp. He thinks it’ll get audiences to think about a dog’s inner life.”

Annabelle’s nose was full. Without a tissue, she snorted back her salty mucus and swallowed demurely. “A dog’s life?”

The young man’s dark curls receded like an eroding coastline; he would probably shave his head before too long. Annabelle shielded her eyes with her cigarette hand as if his cranium already gleamed.  With sudden dexterity he bent, caught the child under the arms, and swung him out of the stroller. The clean, white rubber bottoms of the toddler’s tiny sneakers flew past Annabelle’s head. Set on his feet, the child tottered toward his doll, picked her up by one of her long, flesh-toned legs, and flipped her into the parking space beside Annabelle’s convertible.

“Careful for cars,” the young man warned, though Annabelle’s was the only vehicle within a hundred yards. “Careful. Yeah-” He kept the corner of his eye on the toddler, while shifting the bulk of his attention to Annabelle- “so P. P. sees each species as having a kind of ‘hook’-something subtle about them that the change into human form exposes. I can’t tell you about the other animals, because he thinks too much information will muddle your performance. But he wants his dog-people kind of fey.”

“‘Fey.'” It was an odd, antique word. Annabelle doubted she’d ever spoken it.

“P. P.’s approach to creating a film can be idiosyncratic.”  The young man’s tone and expression begged for patience-or was it with Annabelle he was showing patience? “His idea is to keep all the parts separate until they meet in the final cut. Like a recipe where the ingredients don’t mix until they reach your palate. Or a painting where each brush stroke is a distinct entity. When you see the whole, you also feel the impact of each separate part.”

“Hmm,” Annabelle said. She threw her cigarette butt to the pavement on the opposite side of her car from the busy child, who had squatted and was marching Barbie along the yellow parking line.

“It’s like he’s arranging flowers,” the young man continued. “P. P., I mean.”

“Okay, so which is he? A chef, a painter, or a florist?”

The young man smiled; his patience had been for Annabelle. “He’s a magician.”

“Fay-Fay-Fay!” The little boy had picked up his doll and was banging it into the door of Annabelle’s car.

“Hey!” she yelled, and slid to her feet. She almost stepped on the child. His shortness surprised her. She wanted to grab his arm, but couldn’t remember ever touching a toddler and didn’t know how to go about it. One of her legs trembled. The child paused in mid-blow, Barbie suspended like an ax, and his gaze boiled at Annabelle. Two teeth from his thrust jaw bit into his upper lip. His sudden ugliness froze Annabelle. When the young man whisked the toddler from the pavement and settled him upon his narrow shoulders, the child’s mouth dilated into a cavernous O. He wrapped one arm around the balding head and drummed his heels against the man’s concave chest while clenching Barbie around her thighs and whipping her long hair in circles as if she were a pole dancer. The young man eyed the car door.

“I’m sorry. He hasn’t had his nap.” He held the boy’s ankles firmly with one hand while he ran the other over the glossy red finish. “You better take a look. Wray-Wray, say you’re sorry to Ms. Hadley. I like your hair short, by the way.”

“Thank you.” She smoothed a hand over the door. “Nothing here.”

The child squeezed his knees against the young man’s neck and continued to whip his doll in circles. “Fay-Fay-Fay-”

“Probably has to pee. Do you have to pee, Wray? You might not get an apology. I’m not sure I ever taught him ‘sorry.’ Hey up there-have you got a ‘sorry’ for the nice lady?”

What did Annabelle know about children? Didn’t they all have syndromes these days? Aspberger’s or ADD or something. What had she heard about babies on the news? Mothers had six or seven or even eight at a time; toddlers tumbled from windows or into tiger pits at the zoo. Sometimes they were found, alive or dead, in dumpsters. Annabelle’s thoughts spun as if she were the doll the little boy-Ray-Ray?-continued to whip in circles, and she tried to spot a focal point like a ballet dancer. The child rested his chin on the fringe of the young man’s disappearing curls, and their heads, one atop the other, reminded her of a totem pole.

“You’re Carl Walchuk-” she blurted. She supposed she’d known all along: Carl Walchuk, screenwriter of Doctor Moreau, erstwhile child star, and the son of Raymond Walchuk. Why hadn’t they met decades ago on the set of Svidrigaylov’s Dream? Had he seen her wearing all that makeup? “-and this is your little brother.” Not his son. She’d seen it on E News a couple of years ago: how, after Raymond Walchuk had been dead for years, his ex-wife used his defrosted sperm, over which she still held custody, for the in vitro fertilization of her eggs.  After seeing a zygote implanted in a surrogate’s womb, she’d died of cancer before her second child’s birth. Which left Carl to inherit the infant-a surprise little brother, a quarter of a century his junior.

Carl Walchuk smiled like someone accustomed to deferred recognition.  “This is Wray.” He dipped the boy toward Annabelle. “-with a W. He’s named after his father, homophonetically. His initials are W. W. People usually use initials to make their names easier to say. Like P. P. Frederico-his real name’s unpronounceable. But ‘W. W.’ is six syllables. Remember vets referring to ‘double-ya-double-ya-two’? The abbreviation takes twice as long to say as ‘World War Two-it made the war shorter and longer at the same time-a love-hate relationship for the greatest generation. My grandfather spent that war on a Pacific island-the same one that P. P. is from. I’ve been there, but I forget its name. My dad made Son of Kong there. Oh-and the doll is Fay. Her name is Fay. I don’t know how she identifies herself sexually; I don’t believe lesbians use ‘fey,’ but I’m no expert.”

“Wray and Fay.”

“Embarrassing, I know. Really, on his birth certificate it’s Raymond. After our father, like I said.  You and I could have met a long time ago, but we never did, even though I told my friends for years that we were thick as thieves. I even told them you kissed me. On the cheek. Under mistletoe-on the movie set. They say we dig ourselves in deeper when we elaborate lies, but I think a good lie is in the details.” He shifted the child on his shoulders. The boy made a V of Barbie’s legs and wedged them around his throat, aiming the prone figure at Annabelle like a divining rod. “He really loves this doll. I tried a GI Joe, but he didn’t take to it. He didn’t like his stuffed Kiko either-remember the white monkey they marketed with Son of Kong? We’ve still got dozens of them at home spilling out of closets. You want one? Mint condition, wrapped in plastic, probably worth something on eBay. I don’t know at what age Wray will identify himself as a particular sex, or if it’s happened already. The W will help if he’s transgendered, though, don’t you think? ‘Wray’- that could be male or female.” If Carl was joking, his expression didn’t belie it.

“I had a Kiko. The little white ape.” Annabelle hadn’t thought of Kiko in years, but suddenly she could almost feel his soft weight in her cradling arms.

“Sure you did. Every kid had one after Son of Kong. That doll kept my dad out of the poorhouse.”

Annabelle looked at the toddler perched on his brother’s shoulders. “You’re raising your little brother.”

“Mom’s dying gift to her soon-to-be-orphaned elder son,” he said. “The beauty of an indestructible egg, a surrogate’s wholesome womb, and Daddy’s frozen sperm. Whenever I think of little Wray’s origins, I picture a strawberry daiquiri.” He jostled the little boy.  “How’s Fay, Wray?”

“Fay-Fay-Fay,” the boy muttered, then began to chew Barbie’s foot.

“We’re quite a novelty act,” Carl said.  “Little guy’s the Ninth Wonder of the World. I pretend I’m the Empire State Building. We’re on constant lookout for biplanes. I suppose one day he’ll find out Kong’s son never made it off Skull Island. We should all know our personal histories, right? You ready to go back to recording? Trust P. P. and fey it up. It may seem simplistic and offensive, but he’s got amazing instincts-or incredible luck. I told you your hair looks good short, right?”

Usually a man would compliment Annabelle’s eyes, and then his gaze would melt over her breasts like sculpting hands. She patted her head, felt its contour under the bristles and, when her palm passed over her face, sniffed her breath-tobacco scented, but not foul. “You did,” she said. “Thanks again.”

*****

The lilting sibilance she gave M’ling’s growl struck the right chord, and P. P. Frederico approved Annabelle’s delivery of her first line on the twentieth take.

“Your breakfast, Sir,” she recited next, to P. P.’s immediate satisfaction. Though M’ling was present in most scenes, he spoke rarely. Most of Annabelle’s contribution consisted not of words, but of background gutturals that P. P. Frederico insisted be precisely matched to a setting that existed only in his mind’s eye.  Annabelle locked her gaze on her character’s featureless blob as if it were her reflection and listened to P. P.’s directions (“try a long ‘grrr,’ almost a whimper, here-“) while her thoughts wandered. She fancied a pair of lips on the blank face whispering “Kiko.” She’d loved The Son of Kong. She’d made her parents take her to see it in the theatre three times, and the video and doll had been birthday gifts. The giant juvenile ape was so cute, and heroic, too. She agreed with her parents-it would be fun to meet the man who’d made her favorite movie.  She’d brought Kiko along to the first day of filming on the set of Svidrigaylov’s Dream, coddling him like a nursing infant, as if Mr. Raymond Walchuk himself were to confer a personal blessing on the ape-doll. But Kiko had been left with her mother on the other side of the lights, while Annabelle’s child face had disappeared beneath the brush strokes of Raymond Walchuk’s makeup experts.

“He’s thinking fucky-fucky,” Raymond Walchuk explained to Annabelle, who was waiting beneath her transformed features. She hadn’t understood. “You’re the dream Svidrigaylov can’t help from happening.”Annabelle had cuddled in the bed Raymond Walchuk lay her in before the cameras, the first bed she’d occupied without her Kiko in months. She’d smiled with her made up face the way he told her to, purred a laugh, and licked her lips as directed-she had never forgotten their sweet, slick taste, remembered it with each of ten thousand adult applications. From time to time she heard rumors that rough cuts of her scene from the unfinished Svidrigaylov’s Dream survived, but Annabelle knew the dream belonged only to her.

*****

Annabelle wondered how much of Svidrigaylov’s Dream lay between them during her first night in bed with Carl. He’d been an attentive, even fastidious lover. She couldn’t recall fucking on cleaner sheets.

At the end of her week as the voice of M’ling, Carl had invited to share a meal with “les frères Walchuk,” and she’d accepted, although she might have begged off if she’d known how trying the last recording session would be. The script finished, P. P. Frederico requested “a treasury of utterances” so calling back Annabelle wouldn’t be necessary if a particular effect were required. For half a day she fulfilled his demands for snarls, snorts, barks, whimpers, and an array of howls in different pitches. Most harrowing was the last vocalization P. P. solicited: a long wail broken by a string of sobs and ending with a strangled cough.

She left the studio drained, responding with a grim smile to the director’s observation, “Now that was cathartic, wasn’t it?”

But a meal with the Walchuk boys had been salubrious. The three of them had shared a spaghetti dinner around the kitchen table of Carl’s Studio City home. The toddler ate with his fingers the strands his big brother had cut into bite sized pieces, and soon his cheeks, T-shirt, and overalls were sauce-stained.  “Submersion-emersion!” Carl announced, which Annabelle discovered meant a raucous, splash-filled, pre- bedtime bath that included the vigorous scrubbing not only of Wray, but also his ubiquitous Barbie. “Pity,” Wray-Wray said about the plastic figurine at one point, quieting down amid his bubbles and inserting Barbie’s head into his mouth. “He means ‘Pretty.’ I think.” Carl said. The doll’s wet hair must have been soapy, because Wray-Wray jerked her out and spat, then held her at arm’s length and gazed at her. “Fay,” he’d sighed with such exaggerated rue that he might have been acting.

Carl’s baby, Annabelle thought as she held the wriggling child out for him to towel dry. Then Wray, freshly pajama-ed, had curled between them on his over-sized bed. He lay facing Carl, who read The Cat in the Hat with excessive passion, both brothers lost in the destructive hijinks of Thing One and Thing Two. Wray had drawn up his knees fetally and planted the soles of his small feet on Annabelle’s breasts as if he were preparing to spring off them toward his brother. But he wasn’t exactly Carl’s baby, was he? Had Carl been such a disappointment to his mother that she’d felt the need to try again with a test-tube pregnancy? Yet she’d chosen to duplicate her first child’s genetic code with Raymond Walchuk’s dangerous sperm.

With a formality Annabelle found charming, Carl granted her permission to smoke in his bed. It was a sentiment she knew she’d never before applied to a sex-partner.

“So what the hell are Thing One and Thing Two?” he asked. Annabelle lay with a wineglass- ashtray, its stem sticky with diet Coke, perched on her belly. She’d spilled her cigarettes over the sheets, and Carl played with them as if they were Leggos he’d just discovered at the bottom of a toy chest. He sighted her down the line of one of them and waited for her to reply.

“What do you mean? They’re ‘Things.'”

“Well-where’d the Cat get them from? Who are their parents and why didn’t they give their children better names? Maybe they came from Doctor Moreau’s pet shop.” He raised his eyebrows. “Do you think I’m screwing up my brother?”

Annabelle hesitated.  He’d baited the nature vs. nurture trap, and it was a discussion she wasn’t eager to have with the son of Raymond Walchuk. “I don’t think so,” she said, “But I don’t know anything about kids.”

“Who does?” Carl put a cigarette between his lips, then a second and a third.  “We’re all novices,” he mumbled.

“I’m not a novice,” Annabelle said. “I’m just not in the game. I don’t qualify at all.”

Carl spit out the cigarettes. One clung to his lower lip, and he left it there. Annabelle watched it bounce on his chin while he spoke until it finally dropped to the bed: “How do I know if there’s something wrong with the kid? What if he’s autistic. Or maybe he’s got infantile Tourette syndrome. Is there such a thing? Obsessive-compulsive disorder? Ecolalia? You see him with that doll. How do I even know if he’s a boy or a girl inside-or something else entirely.  You have to admit, he lacks coherence.”

“He’s a baby, Carl. It seems to me you’re doing a wonderful job.”

“But you’ve declared yourself unqualified. And I will brook no platitudes.”

“He seems happy. I think he’s happy-at least not unhappy.”

“I’m remarkable, I know. Heroic. Maybe I’ll get nominated for bro-dad of the year. I like to make it awkward for people not to compliment me. But I’ve got a bigger question.” He was playing with the cigarettes again, throwing them like darts at Annabelle’s hip-no, at her ass, and she imagined him impossibly lodging one between her cheeks and grinning over his achievement. Given the indulgences she’d allowed her flesh in the past, Annabelle’s modesty surprised her. She shifted the target out of Carl’s range, careful not to spill the soggy ashes from her wineglass. But Carl’s big question. It would have something to do with Raymond Walchuk- the conversation was inevitable.  Annabelle was startled by her sudden certainty that while she and Carl had been fucking, he’d been envisioning her as that leering child-whore his father had turned her into so long ago. Sex under the shadow of Papa Ray’s tombstone. He was the pimp of her history. Maybe she had screwed the son to make his father’s ghost jealous.  Demanding the Bic lighter, lost somewhere in the sheets, Annabelle ran the hand holding a fresh cigarette through her brush cut and felt the shape of her skull. During the one month of public middle school she’d tried before retreating permanently to on-set tutors, someone had slipped an envelope with her name on it into her locker. She’d torn it open excitedly-maybe it was a secret admirer’s note, like the one she’d gotten in her last movie, Poppy Starlight, Girl Astronaut.  Instead she found a photocopied picture captioned “Parisian prostitutes shaved bald for associating with Nazi officers.” “WHORE!! had been printed across the picture in red marker, obscuring the women’s faces.

“You had it last, M’ling. M’ling One.” Carl said. He was watching her closely, and she saw his father’s eyes in his; Raymond Walchuk was in Wray-Wray’s eyes, too, and she heard the three Walchuk men whispering in chorus, “He’s thinking fucky-fucky.”  Carl stretched his leg beneath the sheet and found Annabelle’s thigh with his foot. She remembered the feel of his baby brother’s soles on her breasts. “My question is,” he said, “who was afraid of women, Moreau or H. G. Wells?  There are barely any in the novel. For the first movie they invented Lota, the Panther Woman. Jesus-she might have been my first love! I remember getting nauseous when they showed she had claw-hands, and you figured out she wasn’t human. I’m pretty sure the Panther Woman was the whole point for my father. But P. P. insisted I strip the screenplay down to the original male-fest.”

Annabelle sucked sharply on her cigarette, and her eyes watered.

Carl made a show of checking his arms and shoulders and craned his neck to get a look at his back. “You didn’t leave scratches, did you? Am I bleeding? It’s okay if I am. I don’t mind.”

Not Lota– Kiko, Annabelle wanted to say, but the name of the little white monkey stuck in her throat. She exhaled gruffly, beginning to believe that Carl would dare to embrace her again. “You’re ‘M’ling Two,'” she said.

*****

Wray-Wray Walchuk nearly died on a Saturday evening West Coast time while  Annabelle was on her way back from New York, where she’d flown to discuss a theatrical role: Boo Boo Tannenbaum, a young mother, in an adaptation of J. D. Salinger’s short story, “Down at the Dinghy.

“Really, the play’s about the entire Glass family: Seymour, Franny, Zooey, Buddy-Buddy Glass narrates like the Stage Manager in Our Town,” she’d told Carl before leaving her hotel for the airport.  She read the script this time, and had accepted the part after a second lunch with the director. “They didn’t even ask me to read. P. P. apparently said some pretty nice things about my worth ethic. Wray-Wray was napping, Carl said, and would be sorry that he missed her call. “Tell him ‘It wasn’t the planes-it was Beauty killed the Beast,'” Annabelle said. Maybe, she fantasized, the Walchuk boys could relocate to New York City for the run of “Dinghy,” and she could show Wray the real Empire State Building.

At JFK, conscious of heads turning toward her, Annabelle waited for her return flight and thumbed a message to Carl: “I love you.” She’d hardly the time to marvel at the words she’d texted before a young woman in military fatigues asked for an autograph and echoed them. “I loved you!” she gushed. A small fever sore cracked over her upper lip. “Back when you played those triplets in Switcheroo. For years I thought there were really three of you.”

“Just me,” Annabelle said, as she signed what looked like the back of an official military communication.

Minutes later, settled into her seat on the plane, Annabelle caught her breath when her phone revealed a new voicemail from Carl. She cupped it to her ear,            anticipating anything but what she heard.

Carl’s voice, raw and electric: “You must be in the air. I’m at the hospital. Don’t worry, everything is okay. Wray choked-he bit the head off Barbie. I called 911, but he turned blue, and his eyes were rolling. I Googled ‘tracheotomy.’  I stabbed him in the throat with a shishkebab skewer, where the picture showed, between his-I forget what they’re called.  Oh, God-blood spurt out, not much, and bubbles. I stuck a soda straw in the hole like it said to do, and I held him on the kitchen counter with a dish towel under his head and my hand on his chest, and he looked at me, like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ but he didn’t move, and the paramedics showed up and took over and said I saved his life. But it’s okay. I did okay. Wray’s going to be okay-I-we’re-at the hospital, LA General, I-”

The call ended abruptly, as if Carl had dropped the phone or it had been snatched from him. Breathless, barely able to hear because of a ringing in her ears, she listened to Carl’s message a second, then a third time. Finally, unable to wave off the flight attendant bowing over her-the time for shutting off cells had long passed- Annabelle gave up. She shut off the phone, tucked it in her bag, and showed her empty hands to the attendant, who winked and moved down the aisle.

Annabelle shrank back in her seat. How could news be delivered this way? It was as if an old-fashioned postcard, one with a picture of a monument or tropical sunset, had been blown onto her lap through an open window. As if its message were addressed to somebody else, and by reading it Annabelle was somehow trespassing. Carl’s voice-it had been his, yet more than his-triumphant-tragedy had been averted. How had he done what he’d done? Little Wray’s limp body in his arms-skewering the baby’s throat-a soda straw! When, Annabelle wondered, had she entered Carl’s thoughts? Had he cleared her out as he dedicated himself to saving his baby brother? How long before she reappeared?

Maybe he’d read her text just before-maybe he’d lingered over it a moment too long while Wray bit the head off his doll. Carl had been about to say what when his message was cut off?  Annabelle felt like a victim and was angry at herself for it, but that anger was inside a greater anger she couldn’t name. But-Wray was fine. Thank God.

With horror she remembered an early date with Carl at a restaurant where he’d been certain they’d be safe from prying eyes. That night she’d fantasized about choking, because she had choked, just for a moment, on a clot of the melted cheese smothering her French onion soup. She’d strained for air with a rush of panic before clearing her throat, then wondered how the man across from her, his eyes on his own plate, would react if she really were choking-would he rescue her? Would he wrap his arms around her and try to squeeze the death out? Why hadn’t she been the one he’d saved?

The flight attendant offered a beverage, and Annabelle asked for a scotch, and when it was brought, immediately ordered a second. Responding to Carl’s message was impossible-they’d ascended into turbulent skies, and the signs prohibiting electronics remained lit. Carl was a hero. There would be publicity. Layers of privacy would peel away like old wallpaper. Carl would be the toast of Hollywood. Carl Walchuk: son of Raymond Walchuk; savior of his test-tube brother; lover of Annabelle Hadley, rehab slut-it was too soon for her to be redeemed, no one would believe she’d earned it.

She hated jets, but on her flight to New York Annabelle had been so busy reviewing the “Dinghy” script that she hadn’t bothered with the Xanax prescribed for her. Now she gagged down a double dose with her second drink. The cabin seemed to shrink. The jet struggled against the storm, and Annabelle imagined the fuselage gripped by a gigantic hand before she plummeted into a tormented sleep. She dreamed she saw Carl’s back as he stood over a black granite counter. The perspective shifted, directly overhead now, just as Carl raised what looked like a silver spike and drove it downward into the small figure sprawled across the granite. It was Wray, she knew, but it was also a little white monkey, and its limbs jerked when the spike pierced its throat. There was no blood, just a gust of warm air against Annabelle’s face. Carl yanked the spike out, and Annabelle saw only the bloodless wound, like a rosebud mouth, glistening pink and red against the white flesh and fur.

Then it was dark. Annabelle knew somehow she stood behind a curtain on the stage of a theatre, heard a distinctive voice she couldn’t place-but there was no doubt that it issued from the lips cut into the pale throat. She heard “Moreau” and “M’ling One” and “Walchuk.” Then she heard her name-she was about to be introduced! Annabelle reached reflexively for her face, but her fingers couldn’t find her features. Instead, she smeared makeup, like a child finger-painting, and knew she wore a mask. She heard the rosebud lips on the other side of the curtain whispering into a microphone: “and Annabelle has come a long way from the little girl of Svidrigaylov’s dream . . .” There was a thunderous roar. It could only be applause. It was thick with expectation. One finger on those lips would hush them. She could feel the suction on her fingertip as she plugged the straw’s open end.