Even Bad Men Need Company in the Night

Even Bad Men Need Company in the Night

Samuel Jensen

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“Young Flower” by Samuel Jensen

Pathetic, really, how late in life he had come into his beauty. It didn’t even have the decency to be the normal kind of beauty—no, his was the beauty of a svelte but surprisingly strong former prisoner of a gulag, rangy and bearded, quiet about the before parts of his life but with bright eyes that brightened more when he listened to you, and you thought: oh. It wasn’t like he turned heads on the street, not even in this little ski town, yet in line for a bakery as it opened, or in the unpopular sections of a bookstore, the right kind of person would stop, notice him, and scrape their tongue against their top teeth. The smell of their hair would get stronger and Matt would know that if he opened his mouth they’d think the word love, or at least sex. 

He had nothing against inviting people back to his place, but much more often he found himself invited. He saw the insides of all sorts of apartments and cabins. Often, trying to get back to town in the morning to shower before work, he got turned around between the windbald mountains. This meant he got to the shop at wildly inconsistent times depending on where his date lived or was staying. Vlad of course would already be in the back, listening to the Beach Boys and complaining to himself in Bulgarian. 

Matt worked quietly in the stale shopfront, coaxing the old coffee machine under the gaze of the mounts on the walls, antelope and elk. When he shouldered through the workshop door, steaming mug out in self defense, Vlad switched to complaints in English. 

“You ass bastard,” said Vlad. After his coffee, he calmed and returned to work. 

Currently, Vlad’s professional focus was hooves. An animal’s true essence, he posited, was in its relationship to the ground. This morning, experiments with laces and eyelets crowded his workbench—the floor beneath was piled with failed prototypes incorporating velcro, or inner layers of stocking, or just glue. The job ad had been for an amanuensis. During the interview, conducted on Facebook Messenger, Vlad had asked all sorts of questions about sewing, the treatment of hides, and other such taxidermic knowledge Matt did not have, but in practice the job was making coffee, manning the forlorn front desk, and talking to Vlad. The talking was the hardest part. Vlad took his work seriously, especially his current project, and it was an art to know when he needed building up and when he was due for a cold dose of reality. 

“So,” said Vlad. “Young Flower.” 

Vlad called him Young Flower. Matt was 30. 

“You must please tell me. I am dying to know. Have you always had such girlish ankles? Or did you earn them in the acrobatics gymnasium?”

“Oh, these?” Matt joked. Jokes were, generally, safe. “These are my mother’s.”

“God, she must be an elegant woman!”

“Yeah, well, keep your eyes to yourself or I’ll start charging.”

Vlad laughed hard. Then his eyes went flat and in disgust he threw down his tools. 

“I must stop thinking in clothes!” he exclaimed. “A bull wears no clothes. A bull is. I must think: skin. I must have new skin.”

Partly, Matt thought, the tragedy of Vlad was that he’d been born a few decades too early. These days, if you wanted a new kind of skin there were all sorts of resources and communities online. Agreed-upon, empowering taxonomies. You picked the animal you wanted to be, added the word kin to its name, and you were reborn. Matt wasn’t sure whether Vlad was aware of the existence of furries. He wasn’t about to tell him. Though a humble Oregon taxidermist, Vlad was a tortured genius type. If he found out other people were already doing what he was trying to do—even with much less commitment—it would go one of two ways. Either he’d laugh and laugh at the synthetic fur and moé optimism,  or he’d go quietly up to his apartment above the shop and blow his brains out.

That night, Matt had dinner with a cosmetologist. She wore black latex gloves when she cut hair. It was part of the uniform. She had a throatpiece of an open pair of scissors. When it was Matt’s turn to talk about work he talked about Vlad, though not the project, whatever the project was. He listened to Vlad talk about it all day but wouldn’t know where to begin describing it. Hooves? New skin?

“Vlad’s really into animals,” Matt told her. “I’ve been kind of worried about him.” Which was the truth. 

“Hmm. Does he have any friends?” asked the cosmetologist from the kitchen, grabbing them beers. Matt lay naked in her bed, which was also more or less in the kitchen. 

“Sort of.” 

One day after closing, Vlad had said, “Come, Young Flower! We go out.” In his suspensionless pickup they’d driven up the mountain to a campground filled with men. On the way, Vlad had explained how men have to work hard to retain friendships, especially as they get older. Old men who are alone die fast. 

“And what,” asked the cosmetologist, “women get assigned magic besties?” 

“I asked about that. Vlad’s theory is that women have spent millennia living under the overwhelming, institutionalized hatred of men. To survive, they’ve developed methods of underground friendmaking, the creation of alliances beneath and within a hostile power. Nowadays, with things sort of equalizing power-wise, men are discovering they don’t know such methods. They’ve never needed to develop them.”

The cosmetologist considered. “I’ll have to get back to you on whether I’m offended by that.” 

In any case, Vlad, the men, and by extension Matt had spent the evening doing nothing at all. Some played horseshoes at first, but eventually all settled around the fire in silence, adding wood until it was right to stop adding it, and the hoop of their faces dimmed like cave paintings in the sputter of a people’s last dying torch. 

“Oh and get this,” Matt told the cosmetologist. “When they all went home, they didn’t say goodbye. They said: Good luck with the night.” 

“Weird,” she said. “Norway, right?”

“Bulgaria. It’s between three seas.”

“Oh, I was going to say something about long, dark winters. No accent on you, though.”

“I’m from California.”

“Oof. Money problems?”

She meant the reason for his being in town. Middle of nowhere. At first he had lied about why, but pretty quickly it turned out he couldn’t do it right, not about Ingrid. So he’d thought out a pared-down version for dates.

“Grief reasons,” he said. “Death in the family and I came up here because I couldn’t stand it. Staying down there, I mean.” 

“Sounds bad,” said the cosmetologist. For a second she was stiff with discomfort but then she loosened and set her beer on the bedside table, which was her microwave. She put the sole of one bare foot against Matt’s chest. “Hi,” she said. 

Vlad hit the books. This was the first time Matt had known him to conduct research, but one day bringing a refill he found him braced over a double-page diagram of a bull cut in half, its insides trussed, color-coded, and labeled. He turned the page. The next spread was dedicated to the matador, similarly labeled though his insides were not on display. The red cape was called the muleta. The costume was called traje de luces. Suit of lights. Without turning, Vlad spoke: “I think, Young Flower, I am arriving at some kind of idea.”

Matt paused. The few times Vlad had made a pronouncement like this, Matt had come in the next morning to find the taxidermist mute with misery because, once again, the latest unnamable idea had failed unnamably. He refused to say what had happened those nights—the days after hung hostile and burnt and quiet. Now, not for the first time, Matt wondered whether all this was a little too strange for him. The little shop in the woods, and inside a little man attempting something. He liked Vlad, he did. Criminal paycheck aside he liked the job, its nothingness and total disconnect from what he’d been doing before. But maybe it was time he found a real job at the resort like everyone else, or just moved farther north. 

Before closing for the day, Vlad asked Matt to check on the crate in the utility closet. It was there like always, unpried, compact but long enough to accommodate the horns. Vlad had said that, before opening it, he wanted to be sure. That’s how he put it. Be sure. 

“Looks fine,” Matt reported. 

“Thank you, Young Flower. Now, go clean yourself up! You cannot appear before her so bedraggled!” Matt had told Vlad a little about his dates. 

Now the taxidermist looked him in the eye. “Good luck with the night,” he said. 

In fact, Matt did not have a date that night. Instead he took a walk. As he paused to browse the one-dollar carts outside the used bookstore, a woman pulled up like a hunting hound. She breathed loudly out her nose and looked Matt right in the eyes. “You were an emo kid,” she announced. “I can tell.”

He was wearing a band t-shirt. “Oh yeah?” he asked. 

“They were my Myspace page song circa 2007.” 

“Haha. I can just see your scene bangs and studded belt.”

“Oh, I still have that belt,” she said. “Wanna see?”

He guessed it had been a while for her because he got winded trying to keep up walking to her place. Downtown was rental shops and specialty gear stores beneath apartments and Airbnbs. All exploded with skiers in the winter, though he’d only been here long enough to catch the tail end of the previous season. 

The woman said she worked for the resort as a ski lift technician. She was pretty but had strangely dated hair—shiny brown ringlets framing a noble forehead. She probably wouldn’t appreciate him calling her forehead noble, but that’s what it brought to mind for him: feudalism. Sorting her keyring before the door of her third-story walkup, her wrists trembled. 

“I was a punk kid by the way,” Matt told her. “Not an emo kid.”

“Same difference.”

“No way!” he protested. 

She turned the knob. The door opened and water gushed out. It sheeted over their shoes and down the steps, the stairwell echoing like a grotto at low tide.

“Oh, fuck you,” hissed the ski lift technician. “Oh, god damn you.” 

While she rushed downstairs to get the super to shut off the main, Matt ran around her unfamiliar studio picking up objects that seemed both important and susceptible to water damage. A lot of things fell into both categories. The water was cold and she was gone a long time. It was not fun. 

The super turned out to be supers—plural. Two sisters, maybe forties, maybe Swiss. They gave him a synchronized once-over. “With any luck he is a plumber,” one sang. Her accent made it sound like she was singing. 

“Haha,” he said. 

The sisters threw down towels, threw on soup, and hung the soaked area rug from the balcony rail. They made Matt lug up a sump from the basement while the ski lift technician let it all happen around her, looking embarrassed though Matt couldn’t tell in what direction. Then she began to cry. The sisters sat with her. 

“Her mother recently died,” one sister explained, rubbing the ski lift technician’s back. 

“My niece died last year,” Matt offered. 

Both sisters gave him a look that informed him this had been the wrong thing to say, selfish and irrelevant, so he excused himself. He was disappointed, which was fine. The hot drink feeling of want from a stranger was still unpredictable to him. He was learning how many different ways that feeling could go over the course of a night. 

The technician caught up with him on the landing. “Ugh,” she said, “I’m so sorry. Home improvement shit like this is so unsexy to me. But you seem really cool. Raincheck?”

He said, “Sure.” 

A storm came up from the low altitudes overnight. Matt made his morning drive through pondgreen air, black pines thrashing above the old moraines. He was early; the front of the shop stood dark. The door though was unlocked, and when the bell sounded Vlad called out to him from the workshop. 

“Young Flower. Matthew, my friend.” 

A quaver to his voice. 

“You okay, Vlad?”

“I am wonderful. But don’t come in. Before coming in, please pause.” 

“Pause and do what?”

“Just pause.”

“I’m coming in.”

Vlad sat at his workbench, chest heaving, his skin candy red and his clothes inky with sweat. Coming around, Matt saw, hitched up on the stool’s rest bar, one scuffed cowboy boot and one polished hoof. The fur above the hoof curled and shone like a little boy’s tousled crown. 

“Wow, Vlad. It looks real.”

“It is real,” Vlad gasped. “Touch it, Young Flower.”

Matt touched it. It was real. The heavy, split keratin dollop of the hoof. The angle of the pastern joint, a bull’s soundness, everything Vlad had spoken of. Lifting the fur there was no transition line, no place of change from his flesh to its. Blood pumped across and within. The hoof reeked. 

“First,” Vlad said, “coffee.”

Once Matt got him settled, Vlad admonished him through the mugsteam. “Do not be so surprised, Young Flower. I have been telling you this whole time. You did not believe, but it is the law of the universe. If for long enough nothing happens, something will happen. Empathy.”

“Entropy.” 

“Well. In addition, I wished for it very hard.” 

“You wished for it?”

“Yes. It required finding a place of agony. Within, I mean. This will be a problem for us, as I cannot remember how I reached that place. But that is for the future. For now my happiness is enormous.”

The rest of the day, Vlad lunged about heroically, humming to himself. He took stretches of hide and draped them over a pommel horse, then spread them on the floor and lay on top, arms crossed like the undead soon to rise. Meanwhile, his new hoof was real. No way around it. The hoof leg was longer than his human leg, and when he walked he bobbed up on it, then swung back down. Shuffle, click. 

Matt sat at the workbench, nauseated. He wondered who he could call. As if he didn’t know. He’d never deleted his brother’s texts from his phone. Because Cooper wasn’t texting him anymore, the vitriol his brother sent after Matt disappeared had slid farther and farther down the screen, buried by texts from dates until Matt just didn’t see it anymore. A few weeks ago, Matt had met a law school hopeful for pasta at a pizza place. She’d talked about acceptance statistics the whole dinner and it had made Matt think of Coop for the first time in a while. His brother the veterinarian. Statistically, vet school was harder to get into than law school or even medical school. The only grad programs with nastier rejection rates were poetry programs, for whatever fucking reason. 

The law school hopeful had been abuzz—not in a good way—with waiting for her news, due any day now. She kept kicking the toe of Matt’s boot under the table with the toe of hers. Right when he became sure it was intentional she sort of shuddered, stood, and, saying she didn’t feel so good, walked out the restaurant door and across its nightblack window to where she’d parked. 

Vlad ordered in two huge blocks of polyurethane that took up most of the workshop. He spent three days carving mannequins out of them, one in his shape and one in the shape of a bull, starting with the chainsaw then switching to a kind of garrote, his face clamped between the huge, trapezoidal filters of an industrial respirator. He insisted Matt wear one too. Before calling it quits each day they vacuumed up the foam dust, then hit each other with the leaf blower. It made Vlad’s hair fly up and he laughed patting it down. “You rascal,” he said. “Good luck with the night.”

A week passed. The next Monday, Matt came in to find Vlad on the floor, gulping air, his body so hot the room had been made hot. Protruding from both legs of Vlad’s cargo shorts were two identical bull’s hooves. 

Matt crouched over him, touched Vlad’s clammy forehead. A substance had pooled beneath. It smelled sweet. 

“Jesus, Vlad.” 

“I am very good,” Vlad said, then coughed for six minutes straight.

Matt helped him up to his apartment, which had thin, public school carpet but big windows full of pine fronds. Vlad had tidied since the last time Matt had been up here, a couple months ago to take out an old window AC unit. New books had been artfully arranged on the coffee table. While Vlad clopped into the kitchen for water, Matt opened An Illustrated History of Bullfighting to an impressionist painting of the moment of the kill: the bright, dartlike flags drooping from the haunch of the downed beast, the blood down it in melodramatic pink. In the middle ground, an attendant handed the fighter his weapon. 

The feeling Matt got from this was bad. 

“Hey Vlad?” he called. “Why a bull in the first place?” 

Vlad emerged from the kitchen with, instead of water, a bottle of red and the stems of two glasses twined between his chemicalstained fingers. He and Matt sat at his small dining table.

“Hmm,” said Vlad, pouring. “Well, it is—well, bulls, they are single-minded. Yes? They are strong. A force. Their horns, like a crown, no? They are kings.” 

“Except they’re chattel.”

“Yes, Young Flower!” Vlad exclaimed. “You are right, just so. What I say is too simple. A bull is king of nothing. He is in a pen. He is bred and then he is knocked on the head with a hammer. Do you know how much blood spills from the freshly slit throat of a stunned bull?”

“I guess not.” 

“Magnitudes, Young Flower. Magnitudes.”

If Vlad had earned a second hoof, it meant he’d found his place of agony again. Matt wondered how he was doing it. Hurting himself maybe, physically or otherwise, then using the pain to dive down into some well or through some eye, past some membrane. Real magic probably worked like that. Stepping past a threshold, then fighting your way back with whatever you’d managed to plunder. 

Vlad was beaming. He topped off both glasses. “What I am saying is the bull, even more than an animal, is a symbol. He is a dumb, sad brute and yet we see in this creature dignity? Strength? A bull has no strength. In no contest does the bull prevail. If it kills the fighter, all it earns is the next. And yet. We do see these things. Strength. Through the animal’s own oblivion, we see them.” 

The apartment’s windows were old and set badly in their frames. Matt could hear the tree branches telling on each other. He got the bad feeling again. 

Vlad sat back. “Ah, Young Flower. I want to be a bull because they are cool. That is all. And you? What do you think is cool?”

“Uh. Birds? Like, hawks?” 

Vlad rolled his eyes. “Birds. Of course. You Americans. Hey, Young Flower? Watch this.” 

Out in the empty parking lot, Vlad set his hooves into a sprinter’s starting position then erupted across the gravel, ungainly at first but then finding his rhythm and picking up so much speed Matt’s uncanny valley instinct pinged. When Vlad tried to turn at the lot’s end he couldn’t overcome his own momentum and, arms wheeling, he careened into the brush. After a second, his face poked back out like one of Peter Pan’s lost boys, except old. 

The ski lift technician with the flooded apartment texted, asking for a re-do date. She suggested hiking. Matt remembered her crying over the sound of the sump pump, almost said no, then said yes. The afternoon of, she didn’t take him to any sort of trail but to the autumnbare slopes of the resort itself. There had been fearful talk in town that it wouldn’t snow at all the coming season. Scrabbling after her under the lonely lift lines, Matt theorized how badly being at her place of employment killed the mood. The answer didn’t matter. Matt didn’t go on dates for the mood. 

She seemed anxious again. They talked while resting on a bluff, periodically cupped and uncupped by giant hands of mist. She talked about her job, how she liked the way it was high skill but low stakes. He defined the word amanuensis for her. 

“Wow. Are you an artist too?” she asked. 

“Not really. In a previous life I was an actor.” 

“No lie?” 

Immediately Matt wished he had lied. He usually did about the acting. But he was rooting for the technician, had been trying to encourage her, offer up something. By mistake he’d offered a true thing he did not want to talk about. 

Meanwhile the technician waited. 

He’d been born and raised in an unfamous part of LA’s sprawl, Claremont if she was interested. Mortifyingly, he fell in love with the movies. He insisted and whined and his parents had paid for theater magnet school, but neither of them were in the business so after that he’d had to get lucky. And he did. From an open call he was cast as Lancelot in an overly ambitious but visually stunning adaptation of The Once and Future King, which led to a lead role in a gender-swapped, eighties junkie neo-horror version of The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. Indie darling, critically acclaimed. He got an agent. He was 19. He appeared in a handful of decent projects out of respected studios and was breaking into second- and third-round auditions for bigger things from hot directors. He was good. 

And then 10 years passed. If he’d had a moment it was gone. His agent’s words. The few casting directors he did get in with said they were moving in a different direction, or that he was talented but, unfortunately, not handsome enough.

“Uh, you’re pretty handsome,” the ski lift technician said. “At least I think so.” 

“Thanks. But there’s handsome and there’s movie handsome. And I’m more handsome now than I was then.” 

Joshing him for vanity, she looked him up on her phone. Press tour shots and film GIFs. 

“Oh dang,” she said. “You are more handsome.” Here she frowned, confused. “But wouldn’t that mean you’d have better luck now? Getting hired? Cast?” 

He shrugged. 

“Did you get tired of trying? Is that why you’re up here? Or did something big break your heart?” 

Matt looked at her anew. “You’re good,” he admitted. 

She grinned. “Let me show you something.” 

They hiked up to where one of the lifts terminated. No one around. With a small red lever in a locked metal cabinet she fired it up. The cables shrieked, the hanging chairs began to move. They got on one together and descended along the angle of the mountain. With no snow, the lift supports and resort outbuildings looked furtive, like the surface protrusions of a vast, secret underground facility. 

The ski lift technician touched his hand, but did not lean in. “Say it up here,” she told him, “if you can’t on the ground. The wind takes your words away, so it’s like you didn’t say them at all. Try it! I’ve banished tons of demons like this.” 

Matt swallowed. 

“Here, I’ll go first.” She cupped her hands around her mouth. He expected her to say something about her mom’s death but instead she shouted: “Margrith and Julia are nice but they’re killing me on rent! They’re bleeding me dry and I hate them!” 

“There,” she said. “Now you.”

“It wasn’t even related to acting,” Matt said.

“That’s okay,” said the technician.

Matt looked down, trying to gauge the distance to the earth below. He swallowed so he could shout.

“My niece died!” he shouted. “Leukemia! I was there for the whole thing! I went with her and my brother and his wife to appointments and surgeries! But it just kept getting worse! She had a downward trend! My brother is a vet and it killed him to be so close to being able to understand and help professionally but not being able to! And she died!” Beside him the technician took her hands off the safety bar and pressed them to her legs. “And suddenly there was LA! And the idea of wading into it all again was so stupid I left! I had to! I left before Ingrid’s funeral and didn’t tell anyone! It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done but it was like I couldn’t see straight! My brother called and texted and I never answered! My phone felt like a bomb until he stopped! Now I’m here!” 

He hated how the volume of his voice gave every sentence an exclamation point. The technician had lied: the wind hadn’t taken a single one of his words away. The lift brought them back to earth and in the vacant parking lot he suggested coffee at his place. She said maybe not. That night she texted to apologize. I have pretty severe issues with abandonment, she wrote. I get what you went through was hard, but I need to protect myself from people not strong enough to, you know, be there. Good luck with everything.

Amazing that you think you understand a single thing about me, he texted back. 

After that, Matt went two weeks, then three, without going on another date. This wasn’t good or bad. Well at first it felt good, easy, then it felt bad. His life condensed more than he’d already made it to. He worked, then went home alone. Cooked something simple and watched a movie. Good luck with the night. He braced for Vlad’s next change. 

Only it didn’t come. Two weeks, three—whatever Vlad had done before he seemed to be having trouble doing again. The taxidermist turned jokey, then brittle. At the shop, Matt didn’t know where to position himself relative to his dark cloud; if he stayed in front, Vlad seemed abandoned. If he hung out in the workshop, he had to witness Vlad abusing the mannequins. The man-shaped mannequin he covered in animal parts and orbited, telling it things in Bulgarian that could only be degrading. The bull mannequin stood away, faced into a corner. 

“It is as I feared,” Vlad groaned. 

Matt hesitated. “The agony problem?”

Vlad covered his face. 

“I’ve been trying to understand,” Matt said. “What you did the first two times—” 

“It is different,” Vlad snapped. “Every time different, every time harder. I am trying now to be two things. Not a bull and a man, but a symbol and a being. The symbol endures. The being ends.” 

The being ends, thought Matt. 

“The problem is this. I must wish for it, yes? I have wished for it. But what I have already, it is too much like I hoped it would be. The changing is too beautiful and I keep thinking how beautiful it is. I know it will eventually become familiar and less bright. All it will take is time. But ah, Young Flower, I hate to wait. A disgusting flaw, no?”

Before lunch Vlad would not look at his new legs. In the afternoons he stroked them carefully. He tried breathing meditations, following the recorded voice on an app he’d asked Matt to download onto his phone. When not meditating, Vlad breathed like his lungs owed him money. It was clear he wasn’t sleeping. Another week. Matt found himself wishing alongside Vlad. 

“Do they hurt?” Matt asked him. “Your legs?” 

“My hooves are wonderful,” Vlad said. “It is the rest of me that is in pain.”

Another week and Matt couldn’t stand it. His apartment, the shop, back to his apartment. This was not surprising to him. On the apps, he matched with a woman who worked for the Bureau of Land Management. He asked if that was like being a park ranger and she responded with a crying laughing emoji. Haha no I’m a clerk.

She invited him to dinner at her cabin and they ate on her amazing deck until a chill set in and she had to lend him a heavier coat. The sun went down. It always had and still did scare him, how quiet it got in this place after dark. The fairy lights she had strung tree to tree did not help but rather burned in invitation to whatever might be walking in the night. And Matt wondered: Where was the magic coming from? Here? The mountains above that sometimes fell? Or had Vlad brought it with him from his homeland between three seas? He was cold and afraid and begged off early to the clerk’s look of hurt confusion. The next day, he went in early for want of anything else to do. 

Vlad slunk across the floor out into the shopfront about midmorning and sat with his back against the counter where Matt was standing. He made wet sounds into his elbow until Matt looked down at his boss. Vlad’s pale scalp at the part of the tough greywire hair, pulled away from his neck into milkmaid braids. Vlad had turned on the building heat for the winter and it was working overtime—they’d stripped down. Vlad wore a tank top and hazard-orange swim trunks, the fur of his hooves spiked with sweat.

“Will you stand there and do nothing, Young Flower?” whispered Vlad. 

This question surprised Matt. Vlad had never asked for help before but more than that Matt was surprised at how angry the question made him. The past weeks had been frustrating, ugly even, but he’d never felt actually pissed off until this moment. I do not want to be here, Matt thought, but Vlad gazed up at him from the floor. 

“What do you want me to do, Vlad?”

Vlad sniffed. “Tell me something bad.” 

“Something bad.” 

“Yes. I am too happy. As usual. Tell me I am never going to do it. Tell me it is hopeless.”

“It’s hopeless,” Matt tried. 

Vlad flinched but then looked disappointed. 

“It’s hopeless, Vlad,” Matt said again. 

Vlad cocked his head. As if at something he detected in Matt’s voice. After a moment he licked his lips. 

“Young Flower,” he said. “What do you say we make a night of it. Hm? The couch has its comforts, take it from me. Be here to see the night. Or what it could be. Lend your perspective. We can talk into the hours. Yes?” 

Matt looked at Vlad. He looked at the clock. Not even noon. Something bad, he thought. 

He started packing up. “Sorry,” he said. “I have a date. I was actually hoping you wouldn’t mind if I took off early. I have a few things to get ready. Have I told you about this girl? I like her a lot. She works for the Bureau of Land Management.” 

Vlad closed his eyes. When he opened them he stood, stroking his braids haplessly. “Early?” the taxidermist said. “Oh well yes of course. Not as though things are happening here.” 

“Thanks.” Matt grabbed his bag, pulled on his hat. 

“A special lady this time, you are saying?”

“That’s right. I might be in love, honestly. Anyway I’ll tell you all about her tomorrow, okay? She’s beautiful. I can’t wait to see her.”

“Ah,” said Vlad. 

He followed Matt to the doorway and was still there when Matt pulled out of the lot. 

At home Matt slept. When he woke it was dark. The responsible thing to do for dinner was leftovers—his fridge was overflowing from ordering in the past month more than was probably morally correct. He couldn’t remember which were most recent. A few styrofoam lids opened to reveal mutated remains. There was a smell, actually. He got a trash bag from under the sink but had trouble opening it; in the light of his one lamp he couldn’t tell the difference between the bag’s inside and its outside. This reminded him of Vlad. Right about now he had to be hyperdense in the darkness of the shop, forgesteam spewing out of his mouth. Ever since Matt had told Vlad about his dates, talk had increased about the girls, the girls out there, was Matt seeing girls, what girls were they, and how many? “Ah you are abandoning me for the girls,” he’d say when Matt leaned through the workshop door at quitting time. “Well, good luck with the night I suppose.” To do Vlad the kindness of solving the agony problem he’d had to be cruel, but Matt wasn’t sure he’d done right. There was no telling how many more nights it would take. 

He took out his phone, tapped to contacts, scrolled. His brother was listed as Brother Cooper, like a monk. As opposed to a veterinarian. After Matt had fled up here, the cruel texts his brother sent became, under the name, benedictions of a kind. 

Cooper was a great veterinarian. He cared for the pets of stars. He had to know something. Matt sat with his thumb over the call icon. He wasn’t sure how he’d broach the subject, so he sat there trying to figure that out. Then his phone shook with an incoming call. Impossibly, it was his brother.

Matt answered on speaker. The connection was wide, hissy with the interference of every cell tower between here and Los Angeles. He heard the spin of ice in a glass. 

“I am giving you a phone call,” Cooper said. He was drunk. 

“This is really fucking weird,” Matt said after a second. 

“Not a great start, bud.” 

“No. I was—I was literally about to call you. Like my thumb was up. But then you called me.” 

“Spooky,” Cooper allowed. 

“Everything okay?” 

“I found out where you’re living today,” Cooper said. “Finally. Francine told me. She brought Spanky in. Her blue-and-gold. That parrot’s fucking ancient. And dying, unfortunately. You remember Francine, right? You were in that movie together. The one set in the apartment building that crosses time like a ship, and the tenants listen to each other through the walls. At the end everything catches fire.” 

“I remember,” Matt said. Over the line he heard the lap of water. “Out by the pool?” 

“Yep. Just little old me.” 

“How’s Lil?” 

“Anyway Francine was like, is Matty still up there in the woods? She’s worried about you. Said I should give you a call. So. I’m calling.” 

Matt imagined Cooper’s backyard. The bluelit pool and soulless monoculture grass. Cooper had kept it so carefully, wasted so much water and leeched so many poisons into the topsoil, so Ingrid would have a soft place to play. Matt hoped Coop and Lilly weren’t having marital problems. But of course they were. Their little girl had died in their arms. 

“It’ll be a year in the spring,” Cooper said.

This was a fact. Nothing Matt could say to it. Last spring had been unseasonably cold in LA. Ingrid had wanted to go to the beach. Her lips had turned blue in the wind, then the rest of her had. 

“You should come home,” Cooper said next. 

This was not a fact. Not even close. 

“What does that mean?” Matt asked. 

“It means come home. You shouldn’t be up there. There’s nothing up there, man.” 

“I guess I don’t know what you’re saying,” Matt said. 

In LA, Cooper stood in anger. Matt heard the topple of his plastic chair. 

“God dammit you little twerp,” he shouted. “I don’t forgive you, okay? You fucking selfish prick. You crumbled the minute we needed you the most. It was the three of us, plus her, the whole time, and then suddenly you were gone. I had to say her name in front of all those people, and Lilly was alone in the front row, and you—a few more days, you piece of shit? I would have driven you up there myself. But no. And tonight? I had to call you. That is fucking monstrous, man.” 

“I know,” Matt said. “I swear I was about to call.” 

“Shut up. Come home. I’m pissed. But come back to LA so I can be pissed at you in LA. You’re not special. You can be forgiven. Someday. You can stay in the office.” 

Matt ran into his tiny bathroom. He was going to barf out of relief. He lifted the seat and bent but the relief stayed put, plugging. Eventually he managed to speak. 

“Lilly might have something to say about that.”

“Oh Lilly will fucking hate it. But come and the two of you can have it out. Listen, your defense is that, yes you missed the funeral, but you were there for everything else. You came over, cleaned up Ingrid’s vomit, and 15 minutes later she couldn’t breathe because she was laughing so hard at some dumb shit you said. Tell Lilly that, then say you’re sorry. That’s all you need to do. Are you ready to say sorry?”

“I’m ready,” Matt said. He was. 

“Good.” 

“But Coop?” 

“Yeah?” 

“I crumbled when Ingrid stopped needing me. That’s what happened.” 

For a long time Cooper didn’t say anything. Then he said, “Come home. You’re not special.” He hung up. 

Matt didn’t wait to start packing. It was suddenly very funny to him how few things he owned. He was rolling one of his four t-shirts when he heard a crash outside. His apartment was on the first floor, with windows to the alleyway there. He opened one and poked his head out. Nothing other than a fallen trash can and a new bite to the breeze. 

In the car, the radio talked about a big surprise snow on the way. Everyone had been worried but it was coming. Matt didn’t really listen. He hadn’t slept. He kept being surprised by the same realization. He’d thought Ingrid dying had clarified the world and what mattered in it but it hadn’t clarified shit. In fact it had hidden so much away. 

He got to the shop. Vlad was in the front, making coffee. He was covered in mud. No, it was fur. A velvet shell of hide up his chest to the top of his throat. The hide looked warm and it suited Vlad in a way Matt would not have guessed. 

Vlad held up a bristled hand. It was still a hand. 

“Before you say a word, Young Flower, I want to say something to you. Thank you.” 

“Vlad, I—” 

“No. No. Whether you meant to or not, you have helped me. It is past. It is good. Thank you hugely.” Vlad stepped forward, gripped Matt’s shoulders. “More importantly Matthew, I am feeling you have something to tell me. Something joyful, yes? It is that you are leaving, no?” At Matt’s expression he said, “Oh it is obvious. You floated in here like a sunbeam. How happy for you! A new stage of your life.” 

Matt explained. He felt he owed an explanation, which was why he’d come. About his life, about moving up here, Ingrid and Lily and his brother. But midway through Vlad disengaged, busying himself straightening a mount. 

“That is wonderful, Young Flower,” Vlad said. “Do you leave now?” 

“Early tomorrow, probably. After they clear the roads. There’s a storm.” This would break his lease but Matt didn’t care. 

“Yes,” Vlad said. “A big one.” 

“I’m sorry it’s so fast.” 

“Oh do not, Matthew. Do not. There is much for you to do. Arrange your conveniences. One last croon upon your lady love. Ha!” 

Matt laughed. “You’re using ‘croon’ wrong.” 

“I will croon you upside the head. But how about this, Young Flower. Do one last favor for me. I have a package. Pick it up, return, and we’ll have a last drink. A good midday drink. I will toast you and you will toast me and we will say our farewells. What do you say?” 

“I say great.” 

“Wonderful. Meet me in the flat.” 

The post office was 20 minutes there, 20 minutes back. Halfway, it began to snow. Ski families were appearing. The streets were suddenly packed with them, hybrid SUVs jockeying, every child with an iPad. There was a line at the post office. Waiting, Matt decided that during their drink he would only tell Vlad kind things, no matter how badly he begged. He thought about the word croon and opened the apps to message the few drinks he had lined up. One of them texted back, disappointed. The other two blocked him. All these dates. His new handsomeness had come on suddenly during the worst time of his life and felt like something distributed out to him by a system as compensation. Acting upon it felt like blooming. Like a televised Olympic feat he wouldn’t accomplish again. Glorious to be wanted, sure, but glory required the logistics of pain. Of being brusquely dismissed, of taking and being taken for granted. Of making concessions, of dehumanizing and being dehumanized in minor ways that weirdly he had not felt accumulate, though they must have. It was all a room he could step out of and thank god.

The postal worker retrieved two packages: a cardboard roll like for a poster and a longer, heavier, rectangular box. Back at the shop Matt parked in a thin blanket of snow on the gravel, climbed the stairs, and let himself into the apartment. “I come bearing gifts!” he called. 

No answer. Outside the snow was turning heavy. Soft music played from a turntable by the small TV and a delicious smell wafted from a sauté pan simmering on the stove. An open bottle breathed on the counter. Vlad was not in the kitchen or the bedroom, nor the bathroom when Matt checked. There was only the music and Vlad’s low furniture, his weirdly chic European taste. He found Vlad’s phone facedown on the carpet by accidentally stepping on it. 

To get to the shop he had to go downstairs and back outside, shifting the packages arm to arm. He shouldered through the front door and the bell jingled. Setting the packages on the counter, he went into the workshop. 

“Vlad,” he called, “whatever’s cooking up there smells amazing.” 

When he saw what was in the workshop he stopped. He turned around and, silently, returned to the shopfront. 

The bull had not reacted hostilely to his presence or even seemed much aware of him. It stood at an oblique angle from the door, staring amicably ahead, chewing its cud, its incredible muscle mass lit into chiaroscuro by the harsh light of the workbench lamp. No evidence whatsoever of rampaging. The only indication of something amiss at all was the fluffs of industrial packaging strewn across the floor from the open utility closet. The man-shaped mannequin had had some of its facial features smoothed. It wore a shirt Matt could not find last night to pack. 

Matt peeked back in. There it was. He noticed the horns for what they were: weapons, rigged to the neanderthal brow beneath a bowlcut tuft of hair. The whippy tail and the eyes, emotionless yet in their whites a madness irrespective. Matt stepped back, wondering what exactly had, in the end, made Vlad sad enough. 

He considered calling animal control. He considered calling Cooper. He had forgotten to mention Vlad last night when they’d talked. He decided against both. The packages lay before him on the counter. After last night’s call, Matt had decided to be a person who kept his promises. The cardboard tube contained a cape the size of an overgenerous apron, red. From the longer box he pulled a narrow and wicked sword, the hilt one-handed, a combination T and crescent guard. Matt held both objects in the thin storm light. He flowed the cape this way and that, getting a feel. Danced back, then forth. Matadors were not killed in the sacred arena but gored. A final test felt expected and fair, all things considered. Behind the door the bull sighed deeply and the sound was his name.