The Language of Goats

His therapist called it l’appel du vide.
“The French have a name for everything. What we are talking about are intrusive thoughts, more or less. Like, wanting to jerk the steering wheel of your car and crash head on into oncoming traffic. Or, perhaps it’s standing at the window of a top floor, high-rise apartment unit and having the sudden urge to jump.”
Hrandis scoffed. “Nonsense. I’ve never felt the urge to do anything of the sort.”
“Perhaps not,” said the therapist. “These thoughts manifest differently in every individual.”
“Sometimes,” Hrandis began, “it just seems as if everyone’s pupils are more horizontal than mine. I’ll be having a normal conversation with someone and then their pupils will go all funny. Like plus signs. Or like the eyes of goats, I suppose.”
The therapist frowned, almost imperceptibly, then scribbled something down in his notepad.

Hrandis left the therapist’s office and decided to use the side entrance to his building to avoid being seen by the concierge. Although he was confident he had done nothing wrong—nothing untoward—he didn’t believe that he would be able to convince others of his truth while looking so disheveled. Something had happened to him in the time between when he left the therapist’s office and when he decided to use the side entrance of his building. He did not know exactly what had happened, but something had happened. The front of his shirt was untucked with dark circles under the arms where pools of sweat had accumulated. His lower lip felt heavy and sensitive to the touch. He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, wiping. When he pulled his hand away, flakes of dried blood remained on his knuckles.

Could I have been accosted? he thought. The victim of a crime, perhaps? He had been assaulted, probably, he was sure of it. That would explain his sore lip and splitting headache. Hrandis knew however, that presentation was everything. They would judge him by his appearance and nothing more. It was inconsequential to the world that he had most likely been the victim of a heinous crime. He knew he would be judged unjustly.

He drew himself a bath and began to scrub furiously. There appeared to be more dried blood underneath his fingernails, which took additional vigorous cleaning to remove.

Hrandis emptied the dresser drawers, throwing clothing into his suitcase haphazardly. He packed his toiletry bag with travel size toothpaste and toothbrush. Before he closed the lid, he emptied the entire contents of his suitcase onto the bed and began the ritual of repacking it.

“Have you been under any stress lately?” the therapist asked.
Hrandis pulled on a hangnail until the skin peeled back to the cuticle. “Aren't we all?”
“Perhaps.”
Hrandis looked at the books on the therapist's shelves. On one side there was only one book, the DSM-5. On the other side, many. The Archaeology of the Mind, Women Who Run With Wolves, The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, Skins and Hides: Better Living Through Improvisational Taxidermy—
Hrandis stopped reading the titles. Skins and Hides? he wondered. What kind of book is this? and later, what kind of therapist is this?
“What on earth is improvisational taxidermy?” he asked.
The therapist put his pen down and placed his notepad on his knee with his hands on top of each other, covering it. “I beg your pardon?”
Hrandis pointed at the bookshelf. “Your book. Skins and Hides: Better Living Through Improvisational Taxidermy.”
The therapist chuckled. “It’s not my book. I didn’t write it.”
“It’s on your shelf,” Hrandis said.
“Ah. So it is.”
“Which means that you purchased the book, or at the very least intended for the book to be on your shelf, regardless of the means by which it got there. It has remained in its place on the shelf, which shows your intentions. The book is there on purpose.”
The therapist nodded. “Perhaps.”

Hrandis sat in the waiting room of the therapist’s office. Two receptionists in floral print scrubs were at the front desk. The sound of their nails clicking and clacking on the keyboard was soothing, or at least Hrandis found it to be so. He imagined the clicking sounds were a recording of multiple heartbeats with the tempo and pitch increased, the deep, rhythmic beating sped up until it became mechanical and thin.
The women at the desk were constantly moving. They took three steps forward, then three steps back, pacing back and forth behind the counter, answering calls and twisting telephone cords around their bodies. They got up and sat down again. Listless, they exuded boredom from their habitat behind the desk.
Hrandis watched them.
If he stared at the receptionists long enough, letting his eyes relax in the way one can look without looking, it appeared that their pupils were horizontally shaped. But when he blinked, the pupils of the receptionists’ eyes appeared normal, round shaped.
Horizontal pupils aligned with the ground, he thought to himself. Elongated so they can see out of the corner of their eyes. Elongated for grazing. So they can see where they are running.
“L’appel du vide!” Hrandis shouted, slapping his knee.
“I’m sorry?”
It was one of the receptionists speaking. Both of them were watching Hrandis. For how long, he did not know. Have they been watching me watching them? Hrandis thought.
“Nothing,” he said.
The receptionist frowned. The one who had not yet spoken looked at her computer monitor, trying to avoid making eye contact. “You already took care of your copay. Was there something else we could help you with?”
Hrandis scurried out of the waiting area without saying a word.

Hrandis reported to Regeneron where he had recently acquired a full-time position working in the mass spectrometry lab. He didn’t have any friends at work but he was friendly. He was on good terms with the other research specialists and made an effort to attend company functions. He always remembered birthdays and was known for giving thoughtful gifts.
One afternoon, while developing methods for protein primary structure analysis, Hrandis noticed someone had left a book in the break room, directly in front of the coffee machine. He felt a coldness run down his spine, then settle in his prostate.
He knew what the book would be before he picked it up. Skins and Hides: Better Living Through Improvisational Taxidermy.
Hrandis dropped the book as if it had stung him.
Could it be? he wondered, and then could it be what? What do I even mean by that?
Hrandis began to sweat. It didn’t make sense. What would my therapist’s book be doing here at my place of employment? Perhaps this was some kind of self-help, invasive therapy technique that he was not privy to; something his therapist could employ only through the element of surprise. He could not think of another reason based in logic, and the unreasonable, illogical explanations he could think of were too much to bear.
He questioned his colleagues as to the origin of the book.
“Now really,” Dr. Sofoluwe chuckled. “Taxidermy? Can you imagine me reading something of the sort?”
He questioned Evelyn in HR who pinched her eyebrows together and groaned. “Hrandis, please. You know I’m a pescatarian.”
This response only confused Hrandis further. What does being a pescatarian have to do with not having any interest in or knowledge of this book? he thought to himself. What does one's diet have to do with anything?
“What's that?” Evelyn stared at him suspiciously.
Did I say that out loud? he thought.
“Say what out loud?” Evelyn asked. She was looking at Hrandis differently now. Something in her gaze that went side to side. Her pupils flattened, stretching out until they touched the sides of her irises. Hrandis blinked and her pupils were normal again.

Hrandis fidgeted in his therapist’s office, picking at the cuticle of his left index finger. The skin around the nail bed was an angry red color. He squeezed the tip of the finger until it pulsed.
“Hrandis?” The therapist was looking at him over the top of his horn rim glasses.
“Sorry.” Hrandis looked up at the therapist. “Did you say something?”
“Yes. I asked you if any of the behavior modification techniques we discussed have been helping.”
Hrandis waved his hand dismissively. “Yes, yes. Negative and positive reinforcement, shaping, self-monitoring, reinforcing incompatible behavior. Pointless things. I know these things. Your techniques will never work because I already know of their existence. Therapy cannot work without the element of surprise. You, of all people, should know this.”
“What do you mean by that?” the therapist asked.
“Don’t play coy with me. I know you’re the one who left that Skins and Hides book in the break room at my job. What I can’t figure out is why. Why leave a book for me at all and why that book in particular?”
Hrandis leaned back into the couch, arms crossed and triumphant.
“A book?” The therapist asked. “I'm sorry but I have no knowledge of this book and I certainly wouldn’t leave anything at your place of employment. There are boundaries. It’s important that we talk about this. Unpack whatever this is. Why is this book a trigger for you?”
Hrandis pressed his thumbnail into the cuticle, driving the sharp edge in between the nail and the shelf of flesh that hung over it. “I don’t know what kind of treatment this is. The book is on your shelf. Right up there. Skins and Hides.”
The therapist turned towards the bookshelf. “I do not have a book with that title, Hrandis. Perhaps you were mistaken. I’m sorry.”
Hrandis pointed at the shelf but the book was no longer there.

That night, Hrandis dreamed he was a horseshoe crab. He watched with compound lateral eyes—thousands of photoreceptors combining to create a large view angle—while the watermen captured hundreds of his brothers and sisters, snatching them up as they came near the beaches to spawn. Hrandis and his brethren were slow moving; the fishermen just waded around in the shallow waters, picking them up and dumping them into buckets atop their floating pallets.

The pallets were brought to shore and loaded onto transports, then moved to a secure facility. Workers removed barnacles, sand and other debris from the shells in order to check for injuries and other superficial ailments. Any injured crabs were put into a bone crusher. The discarded arthropods were fed into the machine from the upper feeding mouth, then crushed under the pulverizing and grinding of the cutting blade, turning them into paste.

After the biomedical horseshoe crab collectors got the healthy ones back to the lab, the crabs were folded in half at their hinged carapaces and strapped to a metal armature known as a bleeding table. Hrandis was one of the healthy crabs. A stainless steel needle was pushed into his pericardium, piercing the tissue around his heart and draining the oxygenated blood. Rows and rows of his brothers and sisters were lined up along the armature in this same fashion. After being fully exhausted, Hrandis was discarded, where he was eventually swept up into the bone crusher for further processing. His powder blue horseshoe crab blood spun in a centrifuge as the technicians prepared to extract the limulus amebocyte lysate.

The dream shifted. Hrandis became one of the technicians, watching the horseshoe crab blood circulate through the tubing, how it ran loops of winding, neon blue, barbed wire down the length of the armature.

Hrandis was an expert at cleaning the machinery. He changed the filters, swapped out old for new and parsed out the hydraulic fluid. He ran his washrag along the inside of the reservoir, then back the other way along the exterior. He checked the hoses, tubing and fittings; recorded the voltage reading to servo valves. But he always found himself drawn back to the armature, stuck in some kind of spiritual trance watching the blood tubes.

The lactescent blue liquid traveled through the winding spiral of tubing. Hrandis absentmindedly wiped his rag on the suction side of the pump until his movements became more of a nervous twitch, rather than movements of cleaning and scrubbing. It was hypnotizing, made all the more surreal by the clicking and hissing sounds that came from the horseshoe crabs as they struggled impotently, their many legs splayed and reaching. The hissing and popping increased in volume and to Hrandis, the cerulean fluid seemed to glow brighter, more intense.

He worked hard, feeding the discarded horseshoe crabs into the mouth of the bone crusher. He swept the rejected things away from the bleeding table, corralling them into something more manageable and easier to move. When Hrandis woke up he could still hear the sound of the crabs.

On the way to the therapist’s office, Hrandis stopped by a taxidermy store where he purchased a serrated fleshing tool and a knecker knife. He held the fleshing tool, balanced it in his hand. He stroked the blade of the knecker.
What is the difference between a skin and a hide? he wondered. What has skins and what has hides?
“Who, not what.”

Hrandis turned to where the sound of the voice was coming from and saw no one. The only other person in the store was the man at the cash register, who’s eyes were glued to his phone and did not seem to be aware of Hrandis’ presence. Just barely, he heard hissing and popping sounds coming from somewhere behind the Employees Only door.
“What other tools would you recommend for an autodidact hoping to explore the field of improvisational taxidermy?” he asked.
The man at the cash register looked up from his phone. “An auto-what now?”
“Taxidermy,” Hrandis replied. “Of the improvisational sort?”
The man shrugged. “Never heard of such a thing.

In the waiting area of his therapist’s office, Hrandis ignored the receptionists. He knew that their pupils were horizontal; he had no need to for a second look. Their true form had been revealed, there was no going back. Besides, he knew that if he blinked or looked away for even a moment, their pupils would revert back to average size and shape. But he knew what they were.
“You seem well,” his therapist said.
Hrandis smiled and fondled the fleshing tool in his coat pocket. “Better than ever.”
His therapist clasped his hands together. “Your change in mood. What would you attribute this to?”
“Ah, yes,” Hrandis said. “That would be my recent enlightenment. My better understanding of the difference between skins and hides.”
“Sorry?”
“See, that’s the thing. There is no difference. There was never any difference.”
His therapist’s pupils were flat and elongated, more so than any he had seen before. He spoke in the language of goats. “I might need to refer you to—”
“No more referrals. All we need is the element of surprise.” Hrandis stood up from the couch and advanced towards his therapist.
“Please,” he pleaded, arm under the desk searching for the panic button. “Sit back down.”
Hrandis held the knecker knife to his therapist’s throat and began to improvise.

***

David Simmons lives in Baltimore where he has worked as an optician, rapper, electrical estimator, and drug dealer. In addition to Grim & Gilded, his work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Another Chicago Magazine, Snarl, 3 Moon Magazine, The Manifest Station, Bridge Eight, Across The Margin, the Washington City Paper and more. His debut novel Ghosts of East Baltimore is forthcoming from Broken River Books. You can keep up with him on social media here:

Twitter: @WholeTimeDavid

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