Pawtuckets

Jan 12, 2008 - 11:01 AM PST

“Evolutionary Ideas”

The baby screams at 2:11, 2:59, 3:33, 4:10, and 4:42. Each time, the shriek cuts through me – a gradual rupture of my sleep: starting slow, gaining momentum, and wrapping up with enough power to shake the dead leaves off of the fall trees. I am never really asleep. I entertain the idea and close my eyes and stare at the black underside of my lids. I lie on top of my sheets as if to not allow myself the comfort of the 100% Down Comforter, that has followed me from New York City to our suburban 'haven' [only to rip it off soon after]. I slept well in Manhattan, and yet we moved out to have a ‘quiet’ existence. I am close to a chuckle thinking of this, but then I quickly hold my breath, hoping the infant didn't hear the sudden exhale that might remove her from semi-blissful sleep. New York was warm, I remember. And at this moment I think of all the reasons we left. Although I know that it was mostly because of my whining for suburbia, right now (when I can’t feel my toes) I want to think it was anyone else’s idea but mine. It has been two minutes of silence and I turn my head to look at my husband. His mouth is cocked open slightly and I see a droplet of saliva coming from his lip. I think our daughter has gotten this from him. I never drool. Or snore. I am a perfect sleeper, a gift since birth, something my mother always bragged about at parties. That as a newborn she would wake me up to make sure I was breathing. My husband is different, he often utters a sound that I swear is rooted in his small intestine and gains momentum as it goes through his esophagus, developing into something that makes me question why I married him. He has not stirred since the first awakening at 2:11.

Two-Eleven. My childhood home in Rhode Island: 211 North Pawtucket Road. I was ten, or younger, and would spend long and drawn out minutes contemplating what a Pawtucket was. No one seemed to know. Was it a kind of crustacean? A rock? One of those ships Columbus sailed in on? While the neighborhood children uninterestingly tossed a pebble into a square and hopped on one foot to collect it, I became an accredited Professor in the rare field of Pawtucket Research. In fact, I was the founding Anthropologist of the school, The Institute of Pawtucket Research and Analysis. The classes were held in my back yard with a younger sibling and other non-clique affiliated compatriots. After much consideration I came to the conclusion that a Pawtucket was timeless creature, like a cockroach, that never seemed to go away. Aliens abducted the species in the 1920s and, because they only existed in a few towns throughout Rhode Island, few people took notice or cared. The ones who did notice decided that since they had already named four streets, and a town, after the animal and people had those names on their business cards, it would be improper to rename these locations. So, we lived on a street named for a small, fuzzy, dog-like, creature, which was abducted by green men in 1929 (another reason for the lack of interest was the crash of this year).

As I reached my teen years, it seemed more and more likely that the Pawtuckets had been returned to us in some new form; that they had been living among us for many years, unknown to mankind. Only I had discovered the secret, and through more research pieced together the events surrounding their return to Earth. The aliens had been experimenting on them and many of their characteristics had changed: their soft fur had been replaced by pasty skin, they grew, and yet their brain size remained the same. The Martians, which had stopped drastically evolving in the mid-18th century, found the Pawtuckets to be the most intriguing of their pets. Among these were: the goldfish, rhinoceros, the pigeon, and those little barb things that smell of peanut butter and stick to your feet when you walk in the woods. The Pawtuckets were perhaps the least intelligent, and therefore the most amendable to the poking and prodding of the two foot-fingered Martians. They were, also, the easiest to replicate, for once a male and female specimen were placed in the same area, they would incessantly mate. This fascinated the green beings that had never seen such unintelligent and useless acts. By 1941, there were over half million Pawtuckets living among the colonies of extra-terrestrials silently circling around our Universe, from the few hundred that they began with. They would mate, eat, and defile the cabins of the usually clean begins. With this, the aliens released their once-favorite experiment back to Earth, gradually, between the years of 1947 an 1963.

I was fourteen when I came to that monumental realization, and I hunted for them with every ounce of free time. If I didn’t have enough free time, I would analyze my teachers, coaches, and friends. The day I discovered my personal relationship to the Pawtucket world, was the day my father moved out. I was asleep when he came in, my mother wasn’t. Though I had often entertained the idea of being part Pawtucket, my parents didn’t meet all the qualifications of the species. Most importantly, they didn’t seem to mate, which I knew was a large characteristic of the Pawtucket lifestyle. On this night, my mother was screaming in such decibels that I was sure only dogs could truly understand or hear her. My father was silent for the most part, although I could hear him moving around in the kitchen. I stared at my green and white striped wallpaper; it was peeling at the edges, and tried to decipher my mother’s words. I heard my mother scream about another woman, and my father protested saying that he felt like he was living with a corpse. My eyes popped open, a light bulb formed above my head. He was a Pawtucket. My mother wasn’t. He had tried, because he loved her, to adapt to the lifestyle of a pure human, but it was impossible, and that was why he was leaving, leaving her for a Pawtucket like himself. He never said these words, but I knew that it was true. This thought would bring me comfort later.

Once I grew older and moved away, I found my own mating customs. I realized my ambitions of becoming an Anthropologist and met my husband researching the extinction of certain plant life. I also came to the heart breaking conclusion that - -

Was that the heater kicking on? Shit, I think. I hold my breath awaiting the inevitable. Here it comes. And…there it is. There are no words for that sound; none of my senses recognize it, because it is inhuman. I'm frigid in my bed, intent on letting her scream through this one. She will go back to sleep, I say. It is amazing to me that the rest of the world stays untouched. The walls don’t shake; the blackness of the room doesn’t turn some color to identify the noise. The only thing changing is I. He finally stirs “Just going to let her cry?” He rolls over and pulls the covers up to his chin, showing no intention of letting his feet hit the cold wood floor. He has his back facing me; I put the image in my mind and think of what I would do if he were looking at me. I would look into his eyes and glare or give him the cold shoulder. I would wrap myself in the blanket, stealing all of it from him, and force him into my reality. He would gaze at me in shock and then, without another option, get up and tend to our daughter. And I would sleep. And he would be cold.

I wish he would understand this. I wish he could be abducted at that moment; he would take our daughter up to the moon and come back when he'd grown a brain and she was past the terrible twos. I wish I could warn him that I am first generation Earth born Pawtucket and that my screaming could reach levels his human ears had never heard before. I wish I could get under my feather blanket rather then allow my toes to go numb.

“The doctor said to just let her learn to fall back asleep,” I finally say. There is no sound; he is back in his dreams, not in my world. His head leans back slightly again, though he’s wiped that spit away, there is a small residue. I smile and put my hand on his chest lightly, and feel it fill with air before falling back down. He’s here, with me. I kiss the spot where his spit was and crawl out of bed, cringing as my feet hit the floor.