Things that go bump

Yesterday I was exhausted. Don't know why, for whatever reason. So when I got home, after missing several trains and standing in the new encroaching cold (a good thing, by the way), I sat on the couch with Matthea Harvey's new book Modern Life (which I've mentioned before).

As one might expect from Harvey, the book is beautifully off-balance, with deer-ostrich Frankensteins and sailboats escaping from the sailors into a storm. And as I was turning the page to poem 4 ("If Scissors Aren't the Answer, What's A Doll to Do?") I heard a horrible retching sound, then laughter from above, from nearby. One of our neighbors is a recent graduate of the Art Institute, and he has been taking stop-motion animation shots out the window between our doors. This requires the window to be open, which really doesn't bother me; it's not as though it's inside my house. But it does, I have discovered, greatly amplify the sounds I hear from outside.

I tried to ignore it, but there it would be again: pause, vomit, and then the same gurgling laughter. I couldn't tell if the laugh was coming from the same throat as the other expectorant, but it sounded to me as if the person were vomiting up blood. In the dark, in the cold.

And there came one of my greatest terrors: for some reason, I've been harboring this fear for awhile (a nightmare fear more than a stressful, conscious one) that some terrible thing will happen to void my entire sense of meaning. In dreams, it takes different shapes: diseases, war, aliens, and ever since 28 Days Later came out, ultimate zombie apocalypse. And there was this sound from somewhere near or even within my small building: violent death sounds, and sounds of devilish delight in it.

I think that the lucid dreamscapes of the Matthea Harvey poems couldn't have helped. Certainly, if I hadn't been exhausted, if I hadn't felt like throwing up myself on the El earlier in the day, I might have thought first of idiot frat boys laughing as they drink too much or punch each other in the stomach. I might have thought: I might be wrong.

But unnameable terrors are not rational, of course. Like this one: later in the evening David and I began watching David Attenborough's Life of Mammals series, specifically, the meat eaters edition. Clearly, the Siberian tiger was one of Attenborough's favorite, because besides calling it the "ultimate graceful killer" or some such thing, he smattered the documentary with eerie images of muscle and orange and black.

Suddenly I remembered reading The Giver long ago, probably in the library of my elementary school. There's a scene in that book where Jonas's younger sister is clutching a rhinoceros toy (or was it an elephant?) and Jonas, already the receiver of the world's memories, tells her Did you know that there used to be real rhinoceroses? And she laughs.

With a chill, that was the feeling I got watching the Siberian tiger run across the snow. It was so big, so real. Was there really such a thing? Could the world really change so much as to erase something like that?