“Chimeras” by Erin Jourdan
I get down on all fours in my brown thrift-store jumpsuit. All Alison has to do is open the door. It doesn’t matter if she is having a good day or the office is a nightmare. We are following the script and she has a neutral look on her face, as if she’s trying not to crack a smile. She knows me, she knows I am behind the door. I know her, I am excited for her to come home, and I show it with my body. I wag my butt and tap at the wood floor with my front paws. The second I hear the door begin to open I go crazy and roll and shake my head. I jump on Alison, with pure awe of her existence and the joy that she is back in my sight, back in the world with me. I am, for a moment, pure. She is, for a moment, receptive to me and my pure excitement. For that minute I am the cutest thing she has ever seen. It doesn’t matter that I failed out of law school. It doesn’t matter that I crashed my car, again. In that single moment, I can finally get some relief from being human.
We take turns, but Alison is a cat. She has a gray jumpsuit that she keeps for this purpose. In the video that we reenact, I am sitting on the couch with a glass of water watching a show. Alison is surreptitious and likes to take her time relaxing into her approach. When she is in her jumpsuit I know that she is not Alison, or even Alison playing the role of a cat. She is a cat. I have to believe that or else it doesn’t work. She makes her way around the room slowly, sometimes getting distracted by bits of fluff or by the shadow on a wall flickering. When she is ready, she approaches the couch and doesn’t make eye contact. When she gets to the edge of the coffee table, she waits until she catches my eye and then knocks the glass of the table. She looks at me defiantly. There are quite a few reactions I could have, but I don’t do any of them because we can’t see exactly how the guy reacted in the video. I remain plain-faced as she stares at me, willing me to get mad, but I don’t. I just shake my head and wag my finger: you are a bad kitty. It’s actually kind of sweet.
We quit fighting when we started reenacting the animal videos. It gave us a sense of compassion and love without necessity. If we all treated each other like humans who love animals, we would be much happier. When the dog pees on the carpet we shouldn’t get mad. It might even be our fault, since we didn’t give them their afternoon walk. Animals are innocent, and we don’t attribute all of our human shit to them or expect them to be better than they are. Alison struck upon the idea after a hard day—she is expected to rip companies apart and put them back together like Legos.
At home that night she was awake but grinding her teeth. I could hear the gnashing and I was worried about her. “Honey, would you like me to draw you a bath?” She shook her head. She already had a glass of Pinot in one hand and the leg-massaging machine from the Sharper Image on her feet. She was trying so hard to be relaxed and healthy. She needed to learn how to self-soothe, but she was born a ruminator—she liked to think things over, ponder a bit, look at the permutations of things, and take in all sides.
*
I would never give up my job doing mergers and acquisitions. I just don’t know how to shift back to my private self in the evening, and I’m always still chewing on things that happened at the office. The opaque decisions that have been made are more internally strategic than externally sound. Why was Phillip putting together a tiger team of twelve? Not for the sake of alliteration. There was something afoot. I can feel it in ways I can’t quite access with words.
It was the katabatic arrival of the dry Santa Anas. Taking another swig of the Pinot, I wondered if this one was better than the last case from Wine Club. Even with the leg massage and red wine, I feel bone dry on the inside, like a bleached-out, desiccated chalky bone grinding against other dry bones. I need a humectant. A humidifier. Another glass of water.
I heard a meow through the screen door, and that was when I started feeding the cat that I nicknamed Rorschach, or just Rory. She was mottled with giant splotches that confused the eye. Her markings seemed to be working against the definition of her face, keeping you from focusing on her eyes or nose. I think I sort of fell in love.
When the spring storms came, Rory disappeared. Later, as the rain battered the house and Rory didn’t show up, I began to ruminate. Where was she? Was she cold? Was she prepared? Was she hungry? Did she find a safe place? At that moment, I realized something about myself —all of my thinking made me believe that I was in control of things. Rory had no control over her life but could sleep wherever she wanted. She was free but didn’t need to vote or keep storage space for her things. She didn’t have plans or disappointments.
I expect nothing of Rory and so much of Mark. What if I could just allow him to live and in return he could just allow me to live? We could just live together and not be so disgusted by each other? Not constantly battling over all the societal stuff? So what if Mark didn’t believe in global warming and refused to recycle—he was a decent enough animal. After failing—I mean, “not passing,” the law board for the seventh time—I felt he was flailing and expected myself to keep it together for both of us. Our marriage made me feel compelled to be superhuman.
I decided to try to shift—I did not need to parse everything constantly. I didn’t need to worry or put myself through a million doomsday scenarios, as if I were a computer at DARPA. I’d just be a cat when I’m at home—no need to feel any pressure to do anything. No reading the paper or keeping up on social media, no TV shows about murder, no documentaries about crimes in the Catholic Church, no shopping for the perfect stopper for my claw-foot bathtub, running down lists of stoppers for which there were fifty-six pages of results on Amazon. No meal prepping or capsule wardrobes. I would not bullet journal or take free online classes at Harvard on the science of happiness or how to use the methods of an FBI interrogator in your personal life. I would just stop and let my animal self take over. If I was hungry I would eat, if sleepy I’d nap. If there was a ray of sunshine, I would bask in it.
*
I suppose I’m the one who started to introduce some epistemological confusion. I wanted to have sex with Alison not like a dog but as a dog.
“That’s impossible,” she told me. “I’m either a human woman or a cat—we can have sex as humans, from behind.”
But that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to have sex as a dog, but with Alison. I wanted to approach her confidently. Erect. Know her smell. Mount her without confusion. I didn’t want to think about any of her human Alison thoughts. I wanted to experience her purely as flesh, similar to my own, built for my flesh. To have sex with the human Alison was to take into account her worldview, the years of knowledge of her likes and dislikes. I told her that our mutual trials, tribulations, successes, and failures still sting when they arise from my memory and ruin the moment.
It also crossed my mind that I may be able to find a female dog. A bitch! That was what I needed—a bitch that I could play with. I didn’t know how to bring this up with Alison, because this would be infidelity by all accounts. But was it?
I ordered a tail online. I thought it would be pleasant to wear and give me a sense of completion, but when I wore it for the first time Alison told me to take it off.
“We aren’t furries.” Alison scolded. “We’re animals.” She had an extremely serious look on her face—her denim-blue eyes sharp and a furrow in the middle of her Oklahoma forehead. I took the tail off, trying not to feel the deep shame of not knowing the rules, and I folded it back up and put it in the Jiffy pack it had come in.
“A tail is an . . . accoutrement.” Alison said with a perfect French accent. The word in French stung even worse, as if she believed I’d been trying too hard.
I knew I wasn’t a furry. I didn’t want to go to conventions in a full-on animal suit and hang out. I wanted to be more of myself, and Alison’s sharp tone and immediate disavowal wounded me. She was my master.
Alison had the power to tell me what I could and couldn’t do, and made the rules for our way of being animals. I am unsure how she came to hold this position. It just seemed like part of our invisible dynamic. I bristled: Why should the human Alison be allowed to make rules for the dog Mark? The human Alison expected obedience, but that didn’t mean that the dog Mark had to understand that, right? It was a big gray area, a tightly woven puzzle.
*
I’ve noticed the pile of human dung starting to dot the northwest corner of the yard, but I’ve decided that it’s a bargain—if I pick up Dog Mark’s poop, then I can keep Rory a secret. It seemed a fair trade-off, and it’s not like I haven’t made such trade-offs before, to the point that my life often feels like a strange embroidery of crooked wisdom and doublespeak.
At work, I was crushing it. Where I had previously come across as stark and severe I now had a sense of grace and mysterious authority. I have no illusions, my coworkers still hate me as much as before, but now they hate me and envy me, and I can feel the change of perspective in their gaze. Before, they only hated me because I was successful and had the power to do mean things to them. Now they hate me for seeming slightly happier about being successful and able to do mean things. There is comfort here, a new smugness. I’ve worked with smug people for years, and now I had it and I felt safe and almost beyond reproach.
I’d thought that becoming a cat would make me a better person, but it turns out that I’m a bit territorial now and I don’t like having a freeloader on my property.
That’s what I told the rescue when I took Rory in: “It pains me to do this, but I’m sure you can find a better home for her than I can. I’m just too busy.” The middle-aged ladies smiled at me and accepted my paltry excuse. They told me not to worry, and that they would take care of everything. Coming home, Mark made my favorite Greek salad and steamed fish, and I savored it at the table. He recently got a job as a legal assistant for a nonprofit, and he seemed to be finding his way in the world with purpose.
“Would you like me to put it on the floor?”
I nodded. I must have seemed tense. Stuffing the collar of my blouse into the neck of my shirt, I got down and sniffed the fish. It was so fragrant. A bit of salt stood out on my tongue when I bit off a morsel. I relaxed and looked up at Mark, still eating at the table. My lids dropped. “You are such a good kitty,” Mark said to me. Taking his plate into the kitchen, he leaned down to run his fingers through my hair. “I’ll get you a treat.”
I was suddenly excited. My eyes opened wide, looking at my person. I went over to him and sat at his feet expectantly. He pulled a bag out of the pantry and in it were treats: bite-sized pieces of beef jerky. He gave me three and petted me again. “You are such a good kitty.” I showed him my belly, and he rubbed it with presence and sweetness. But then his hand grazed my breast, and I noticed a change in him. He started to unbutton my shirt and rub my buttocks in a round motion, insistent. It made me feel confused and I started to back away. I needed to become Alison again, but I wasn’t sure how.
I’d been so happy to see him and get treats. I was halfway between cat and Alison and unsure if what I was doing was right. He whispered, humid in my ear, “I want you to be my hot bitch.” I wasn’t sure if this was OK, but the bestial side of me seemed to take no issue. I decided to think about it later.
*
I didn’t know where to find a bitch to mate with; it would be strange to look for her as Human Mark, so instead I just let my nose guide me. I’d know when I came across a bitch in heat who would understand immediately what I wanted to do. I started spending my lunch hour in the park, watching people go by and slipping into my dog self. It was a nice distraction from work, to just be an animal for a while.
My eyes followed the movement of joggers, and I felt the strange thrum of wheels on the pavement when a skater went by. Over time, I started to linger near the dog park on the northwest corner. It had wrought-iron gates and a dry dirt run with a few benches on either side. I’d take a notepad out of my pocket and had a cover story about taking notes for a case I was working on, but no one said anything; perhaps they thought one of the random dogs was mine. I knew that I was good-looking in a preppy model kind of way. I just blended into the background of the autumn weather in my marled fisherman sweater.
I watched the dogs as if they were characters in a constantly evolving play—some funny, some dominant, some serious. It dawned on me that there were a few dogs that didn’t seem to be interested in other dogs and instead fixated on getting attention from people. It struck me that, just as I was trying to be more of a dog, there were dogs more interested in being human.
One woman at the dog park caught my eye, and I tried to position myself near her as much as possible without seeming creepy. I wasn’t going to make an overture, but without an overture how does someone know that we’re both having the same desire? This woman, in a black oversized sweatshirt, cuffed Levi’s, and low-top sneakers, threw a blue ball to her Groucho-faced terrier mix, which looked at her with a laser focus between worship and ownership. I know that feeling. She had a child’s auburn bob haircut that framed her heart-shaped face and a figure that seemed pillowy and soft. Every day, I went to the dog park and hoped for something.
Of course, it was the ball that started it. A bad throw and a ricochet off the sunshade awning. It hit me in the arm while I was holding a coffee, which went flying out of my hands onto the pissy dirt. I was grateful that something had finally happened, but I still didn’t know what to do. She came over and picked up my paper cup. Her dog had already retrieved the blue ball. I gripped my arm where the ball hit me and pulled up my sleeve, looking for a bruise, a smudge, a pink spot—anything.
“Here, sit down for a minute.” She motioned toward a bench. She sat next to a large open canvas bag filled with a few skeins of thick gold yarn. I sat down next to her, and she quickly threw the ball for the dog, to give me some space.
“I’m sorry that happened.”
“I’m fine,” I said, still rubbing my arm.
“Let me see.” She took my arm with an almost medical precision. As if she were going to check my blood pressure. She ran her fingers from my wrist up to where my shirt started and looked at my skin as if she were reading an ancient rune. “Looks good. Can you flex your wrist and move your fingers without pain?”
“Yes.” The moment was too erotic for me to say more. I could feel the warmth of her hands, and they seemed like hands that knew how to touch, knew how to connect—the pressure, speed, the petting action up my arm. Why didn’t Alison touch me like that? What would it be like if this person was my owner, instead of Alison? It struck me suddenly that this was exactly the crux of the problem. The human part wants to choose; the animal part can either acquiesce or fight. Very few animals get to choose their owners. They do not get to shop around for a good situation, trying to optimize based on their desired outcome. They don’t decide that maybe they should pick an owner in France and try that out. They live their lives constrained.
“Well, let me know if it bruises—I’m a massage therapist and I would be happy to treat it at my office. I’m Greta.” She passed me a business card. The thought of having Greta’s hands on my body was just too much. I would die. I would have an enormous erection and then die. If just her fingers on his arm did this to me, I couldn’t consider the reality of anything more.
“Thank you, Greta.” I took the card but didn’t introduce myself. I smiled at her and left the park. I didn’t plan on coming back. The human side got in the way of my desires and I had no idea how to circumvent it. I was in a conundrum.
*
Mark and I were on better terms than we’d been in years. When I told him that I was pregnant he literally jumped up off the couch and howled. He had to go out for a run to work off his excitement and came back with a gorgeous bouquet of tiger lilies.
At work, I started to show, and I could see my coworkers begin to calculate projects against my due date and subsequent maternity leave. The fact that an institution had to make way for my body made me feel proud. They had to bend to me, for once. I felt ascendant; I had received two promotions in the past six months, as those above me were either fired or moved on to other projects. I had assured management that I’d be back as soon as I could after giving birth and peppered in allusions that Mark was going to make an amazing caregiver to the new baby. “After all, he works at a nonprofit!” I loved to joke with the boys at work. “At first, I thought our marriage was a merger, but it turned out to be an acquisition,” I said. They would laugh, but I smelled their fear, my use of femininity as a weapon cold and calculating as any claw.
Being pregnant made me feel like a warrior in meetings—that nothing, including incubating another human being, was too much for me. I never let my coworkers see my exhaustion, the swelling, the random crying. I hid it the way a cat hides pain. I was full of pride for what my body could do, yet still incredibly nervous about what would happen when I gave birth. All the books said it was the most natural thing in the world, mothers just know, it’s in your DNA. I decided to trust my animal body, and not just because I had no choice.
As time went by and I got bigger, all the changes in my body were like a novel—full of drama and curiosity. This wasn’t the same embarrassment and shame I’d felt as a preteen getting hairs on my pubis and suddenly budding breasts. I was a grown woman who had acquired and merged companies full of hundreds and thousands of souls who made, invented, and created valuable things. One day I tried to put on my cat jumpsuit. I realized that it no longer fit, so I put it in the Goodwill pile with a bunch of other items I wouldn’t need anymore. I imagined that I had soaked up all the wisdom I could get from being a cat and now it was part of me; I didn’t need the suit anymore. I could finally enjoy lying in the sunlight and letting it dapple my protruding belly. I could sleep for fourteen hours straight on weekends and feel no shame.
*
I wake up at 4:30 a.m. and feel a gurgle in my stomach. I’m ready to do it with pride. I will not feel shame. I will not feel shame. I will not feel shame. I repeat this in my mind, and I still feel ashamed. It makes my underarms damp, but I’m also excited by the distended feeling in my stomach. Putting on my brown sweatpants, I ball-heel my way quietly across the plank wood floors and head downstairs. Our house is a sweet little structure that shares part of the yard with an identical bungalow. Getting down on all fours, as if I might start a Marines drill of wading through mud with a rifle in my hands. No hands, all legs, I think. Brownish red silky fur. Human Vizsla eyes. But maybe mixed with a little Irish setter where my fur grows out, a little ragged and wild. I’d dreamt of mallards flying over a steaming lake. Cattails standing tall despite a slight breeze. I am there. Ready to guard the house and Alison and tell anyone who came near us to get the fuck out of my yard. Sniffing the hedge, I get a strong dose of musk. This will not do, this is mine. Pulling down the back of my sweatpants, so that I can get in a proper squat, I relieve myself and I’m so proud. Scratching my turf, I cover the heaping mound with stray and errant bits of grass. It feels so good to have my balls and scrotum so close to the ground, and I rub myself on the ground before snapping onto my back to roll about, showing off my proud tummy. What a day it’s going to be!
Coming out of my trance, I became Mark again. I would try to carry the feeling and smell of the moist dirt and grass with me as if I had been imprinted with pure joy. My insides felt warm and aglow with mirth and good health. I headed back inside. I would be a good husband today. I started making breakfast the way Alison liked it—bread toasted a tawny brown with a drizzle of honey. I would slather her with my love, bathe her in it, bring her whatever she wishes, and look at her as a goddess.
*
Heading into the third trimester, I noticed that I was avoiding Mark. He seemed to mangle his food, touch me in the place I least wanted attention, and focus his conversation on issues that did not hold my interest. I felt almost allergic to him, and I began hearing in my mind the chatter of disgust. Of course, I felt awful. He wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was just overly sensitive, or so I told myself. Hormones were acting up and scrambling my brain. It took immense control to try to tamp down these thoughts as they happened, and for each nasty thought I had about Mark I had to think of two or three positive ones, no matter how banal. He is kind! He is sweet! He is doing his best! They all sounded empty inside my mind.
I’d do my cat and cow stretches in bed to keep my spine limber and see Mark drooling at me from across the room. He even came into the bedroom with my old gray jumpsuit in his mouth. He appeared to have found it in the garage and looked at me longingly. I yelled, “Drop it!” and he did, but at what cost? The look on his face was full of sorrow, much like when I threw his nasty red ball away and refused to put him on the leash. I didn’t want to make him feel sad, but things had changed. I had subsumed my cat self, and I was hoping he could do the same with Dog Mark.
I was experiencing some sort of psychology that I couldn’t put my finger on. Saying it was hormones was as easy as saying it was a microwave oven. I had an inkling of how both worked and yet almost no true understanding. I didn’t want to start hating Mark. The little critical voice inside my head continued, and I fought it with partially understood popular social science. It is easier to say that it was just hormones—a one-word ticket out of needing to analyze the complexities of my marriage.
*
I had originally become a dog to understand the pleasure of being loved unconditionally, yet as it evolved, and my desires grew, it made me unhappy that I couldn’t take it further. What is it about being human that means constantly trying to build a better experience? A more layered feeling? Something even more vibrant?
In Alison’s last trimester, I quit being canine. She told me that she was going to stop picking up my shit in the yard, and I got the message: we had to become human parents. Watching Alison’s body change made me feel more human. I could see the baby kick against her abdomen and feel her shift positions to get comfortable. Sleeping next to her and breathing her hormones all night, I’d wake up from strange dreams with fear coursing through my body. It was in my stomach and radiated up through my back, a pungent hum in my neck connecting to my brain stem. I’d think, over and over, what if this baby is a cat? What if there were six, seven, eight babies inside Alison and she was carrying a feral litter?
In my nightmares there were chimeras—sphinxes, mermaids, centaurs—beasts that existed in mythical times, before science and sonograms. One image that my mind circled was a cinematic battlefield, an amalgam of Lord of the Rings, Civil War battles, and World War II trench warfare—with all the special effects of crimson and navy smoke, wet pools of coagulating blood, and entrails. In this scene, mermaids had been cleaved—human from fish, centaurs separated man from withers, the pretty heads of sphinxes half dipped in mud cut at the nape.
*
No one had given birth at home in my family in two generations, but I decided that was what I wanted to do. A hospital, with the lights, whites, starch, and tech would be like giving birth at the office. In looking for a doula to help with the birth, I found an incredible array of options. Interviewing the cast of characters I came across was fun, since they weren’t the kind of people I usually interacted with. They all seemed great, and I ended up choosing Alma. She had wiry hair cut into a broomlike bob and wore loose-fitting, colorfully embroidered Mexican huipiles.
In the month preceding my due date, Alma came over to the house twice a week to teach me deep diaphragmatic breathing, which struck me as funny, since if there is anything I should know how to do naturally it’s breathe. But when breathing becomes a technique I suppose it also becomes a technology.
The day arrived when my contractions became strong and evenly paced. Alma hovered near me and said clearly, “Keep going, my dear, we were all animals once.” I started to cry, tears mixing with sweat on my already warm face. Mark put the needle down on “Do Right Woman” and held my hand, squeezing it and repeating, “We were all animals once.”
Alma’s gouache brown-green eyes made me melt a little bit. I knew that I hadn’t chosen Alma because of her resume but because of the way she said “my dear,” as if she were speaking across centuries. I felt held in her heart and sure that this was not Alma’s job but, rather, a calling across heredity. Mark found a cold compress for my forehead, and we looked deep into each other’s eyes as I gave birth. The pain became searing, and for a moment I collapsed into myself, as if I were the only one in the room. When I came back to myself, Mark swabbed my forehead and I saw his well-intentioned love and care before the next spasm of body-splitting agony. All the fear left for a few minutes and was replaced by the essence of time itself, the soothing blur of the universe, too much ever to really comprehend.
*
Our baby was beautiful and accompanied by a full head of brown hair, which made her appear older than she was. Soon thinking will begin and she will be susceptible to the constant flow of story. Of looking, feeling, seeming older, and being different from what was expected, or not. She will have a lifetime of being, not being, trying, and fighting the story. She will define, erase, deny, and complicate herself with the tools of humanity. But for now she is a chimera, still a peaceful whole composed of human and animal. She is the combination of us, and with time will it be revealed—which nose, what aptitude? Whose hands, which smile?
As the foreground of birth became the background of everyday parenting, I felt like an empty cave with nothing to illuminate it—just a dusty brain box muddling through. Occasionally, the northwest corner of the yard filled me with nostalgia for the freedom I once had.
Then one night the baby woke me and I poked Alison, but she just pushed me away. I went to the baby’s room and though Alison had a lot of philosophical thoughts on how to handle the baby’s needs, I just bent over the crib and nuzzled her. The wind was wild, with a taste of electricity that I could feel in my nervous system as slight prickles and the zing of being alive.
Moving my lips over her cheek, making sure not to brush her with my stubble, breathing her breath, and sharing my breath with her, I moved my lips over her ear and she smiled. “I know, being alive is terrifying,” I whispered. “But it is better than the alternative.” The baby looked at me with her big eyes and then her focus started to fade, back into the dreams of new beings.
A late Santa Ana gust blew warm air through the open window, and I started to hear a message. Not scratched on the stucco of the house by desiccated palm fronds, but a subterranean message that seemed to enter from my bare feet on the floor—through the wood, covered by coats of varnish.
Here. Sit. Down. Now. It was familiar and soothing, yet I couldn’t place it. It felt true, in that it felt like home, versus other thoughts that felt as if they didn’t belong and were commuters on their way to pick up a train to elsewhere. Here. Sit. Down. Now.
I sat on the circular rag rug repeating the words as I rocked the baby to sleep.
Erin Jourdan is a Los Angeles-based writer and teacher who believes humor is a path to liberation. She received her MFA from San Francisco State University and her work has most recently appeared in the Los Angeles Press, Stonecoast Review, and Interlude Docs. She is currently working on a book of speculative short stories that focus on class, eco-anxiety, and the future. She can be reached via IG @ekjourdan.
