Alex Nai: ~ They clearly want to hold a lamb ~ • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by Alex Nai
THEY CLEARLY WANT TO HOLD A LAMB

The couple is sitting on the wooden bench at the edge of the enclosure, the wobbly one. They look like they are in their late thirties, perhaps early forties. Dressed like they did not expect to walk through pools of mud or jump over a pile of cow shit to get to the enclosure. Not dressed fancy, not at all. Just urban. Like farms and polders are cool and all, but mostly as a concept. They are sitting very close to each other and look around awkwardly, as if wondering whether they shouldn’t be there. There’s no one else their age in the enclosure. Only kids and their parents. And me. And lambs.

They clearly want to hold a lamb. They probably have read somewhere, likely on our website, that you could show up here today and hold a lamb in your lap. Which is true. This is what our website says, explicitly: Come here today if you want to hold a lamb in your lap. With different words, but that’s the gist. Today, come, lambs. One of the newly born ones, little more than bones and fluff. What the website does not say, at least not explicitly, is that the you in that sentence basically refers to kids. Who want to hold a lamb in their lap. Because they are kids.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wicked per se in wanting to hold a lamb when you are not a kid. But the fact is, it doesn’t happen often, OK, it never happens, to have adults sitting here in the enclosure, wanting to hold a lamb in their lap. And that perhaps says something, you know? About them, about who they are and what they think and what they desire. Or perhaps it says something about other couples, those who are currently not sitting on the wooden bench at the edge of the enclosure, the wobbly one, hoping to hold a lamb. Or perhaps it says something about me, standing here with a lamb in my arms, wondering why there’s currently a couple sitting on the wooden bench at the edge of the enclosure, the wobbly one, looking at me and at the lamb in my arms, clearly wanting to hold it. Perhaps it says something about me.

“Do you also want to hold a lamb?” I ask them.

They look immensely relieved, as if what I said was more answer than question. They nod in unison, perhaps one or two times too many, and mumble something in broken Dutch that could or could not have been yes and please and thank you and sure. They had been holding their breath as they were looking at me making my way towards them, the lamb in my arms, trying to avoid walking over little kids and little yeanlings and their little piles of steaming crap, and they both deflate like overstretched balloons as I hand the lamb to the woman of the couple, the less nervous of the two. I try to ignore the stares that three or four parents standing in the enclosure shoot at me as I hand the couple the pile of bones and fluff, stares that I hope the two deflating bags of nerves have missed. But their eyes are only for the lamb. They smile, perhaps somewhat sadly, as they cradle the little fluff.

Perched on the wooden stool in front of the till, guarding the gift shop like a seagull sitting on top of his steaming eggs, Jeroen looks at the couple cradling the lamb with glutinous envy. His spindly limbs are at odds with the height of the table and the stool, an incomplete jigsaw where mismatching pieces have been forced together by an impatient hand. He looks at the couple sitting on the wooden bench for a long time. Then, slowly, he shifts his gaze towards me. I look away.

That evening, after asking all lingering parents and related offspring to please make their way out of the enclosure and toward the gift shop, after raking the enclosure clean of all lingering piles of steaming lamb crap and discarded leaflets with today’s date and instructions where to find us, after telling Jeroen in the gift shop, once again, like nearly almost each day at closing time, that no, I don’t want to have drinks with him, to go bother someone his age, after I get home and sit on the chair in the living room, the old one right under the small TV on the shelf, after all of that, I finally tell Beto about the couple who clearly wanted to hold a lamb.

“Did they cry when they got the lamb?” Beto asks, which feels like an extremely strange thing to say after hearing a story about a couple of not quite middle-aged people sitting nervously in an enclosure wanting to hold a lamb, but also feels like the most perfect of all things to ask. Beto is a bit like that, he never says the right thing, and because of that he always says the right thing. He never asks me how the movie was whenever I go to the cinema without him, which is often, he asks whether I had thought more about the movie or about my work on my way back home. He would not answer whether he was happy, or not, that my parents will be visiting for dinner, he would say that we currently don’t have sufficient room in the fridge. He always asks me how hungry I am immediately after I am finished with my meal, not before. He says thank you after I kiss him.

“I don’t know if they cried. The light in the barn is low, you know.”

“Penumbra.”

“Yes, perhaps.”

“And if you had to guess?”

“Guess what, if they cried?”

“Yes. In the penumbra.”

“If I had to guess, yes, they cried. He did.”

“Good.”

“Why good?”

But he has nothing to say to that, which is of course a perfect answer. Beto seems satisfied that the couple has cried, that at least part of the couple has cried. More than satisfied, almost content. Fulfilled. As if that was the good news he was waiting for. Nodding, he turns his attention back to the little TV on the shelf behind me and over my head. When I got in, on the muted screen were images of altercations between the police and protestors, perhaps in a country far away, perhaps just down the road from our place. Hard to say, they looked like people who live around here, those who were being struck in the face by the policemen, but people who live around here also look like people who live far away. They looked a bit like the couple who wanted to hold the lamb, but also not really. Hard to say where the people who were being beaten to a pulp were from, also because the TV was on mute. He likes to watch TV without the sound, Beto, especially the news. He says that people should put in a little effort. To understand. That we cannot simply absorb what we see, that we need to work for it. A little bit, at least.

Our dinners are usually like that, me sitting under the TV on mute, talking to him as he talks to me but looks at the TV on mute above my head. He can do both things very well, talk to me and watch the TV on mute, and I never feel shortchanged. At the same time, talking to him when he watches TV is a bit surreal, like he is talking to a little gnome perched on top of my head. But that’s ok, he seems to be fond of that gnome, at least that is what I get from the benevolence and love that he puts in our triangulated conversations.

I ask him how his day was, and he answers that people ideally shouldn’t be clubbed in the face for protesting, which is a good answer. I ask him what the protest is about, and he says his boss at the bank where he works, Mark, has again refused to grant time off to a colleague who was edging toward burnout, which is also a good answer. He asks me whether my shoes still hurt my feet, which is something I told him about a month ago right after buying that new pair, and mentioning that it would take about a month for me to work them out. He says that the fridge has little room left when I tell him that my folks suggested visiting tomorrow evening. He asks me whether Jeroen has been bothering me again, has been flirting with me again, and I tell him again that his brother is not someone he should be concerned about. That I can look after myself. He replies that when they were kids, long time ago, he and Jeroen were really close. He seems surprised by the intensity of the recollection and, like each time when he thinks back to those days, Beto’s eyes turn a delicate gray of yearning. Or perhaps regret. I haven’t told him that Jeroen last week didn’t take no for an answer and held my arm so tightly that I still have a bruise. I haven’t found a way to tell Beto.

After dinner Beto and I share some companionable silence, both of us sitting on the couch reading our own books, and then we go to bed, where we continue reading for a bit. He cracks the spine and dog-ears the pages to keep the spot, and yet genuinely loves the bookmarks I keep offering him. We turn off the lights in unison and turn away from each other. We always sleep butt to butt, but every once in a while, and this happens each night, he extends his arm behind him to check whether I am still there. Or still breathing.

The next morning, I decide to walk to the farm, instead of biking. Beto always says that we should walk whenever we don’t have time for walking. That we should walk precisely because we don’t have time for walking. As I walk towards the farm–late for work, but Jeroen can go fuck himself–I think again of the couple who wanted to hold a lamb. I decide, as I walk towards the farm, late for work, that they are not from around here. It is an easy decision; the little they mumbled after I handed them the lamb could not really be qualified as Dutch. I also decide that they are from very far away. United States. No, New Zealand. Northern Island. Coromandel Peninsula. For sure. That they have just inherited a farm themselves, and are traveling around the world for inspiration on how to run one, how to commune with the animals in their future everyday. Alpacas, that is what their farm is. For the wool, perhaps. Not the meat, certainly.

Years ago, when Beto and I were still partly strangers to each other, but already intimate enough to mutually decide, without having to say it out loud, that we didn’t want to be strangers to each other anymore, we had embarked on a road trip all around New Zealand’s North Island. Auckland, then all the way down to Wellington via the forgotten world highway, then up again via Taupo, Rotorua, Hamilton. All the way up to the Coromandel. Rolling green hills like the most bucolic English countryside you can imagine, dotted by sheep and farms and pastorality and restaurants serving only green mussels. Then vertiginous drops into secluded gorges overwhelmed by prehistoric ferns, with Polynesian beaches just waiting around the corner. Paradise is a subjective concept, don’t trust false prophets and blind wisemen who tell you otherwise. But if anything like an objective definition exists, that part of the planet certainly must come close to it.

In Coromandel, Beto and I had stopped at an alpaca farm, just for the sake of it, for the pleasure of it. I remember asking Beto whether he would be interested in stopping at the farm, I remember him replying that the only thing that matters in life is happiness, really, which was a very good answer.

The farm was run by an elderly couple, I don’t remember their names anymore, who said they had both abandoned academic careers, tenured positions in academic careers, and decided that the empty stare of alpacas was more appealing than the empty stare of empty chairs whenever they presented their most recent research in empty conference rooms. They decided that the only thing that matters in life is happiness. Beto had cried, softly, when petting one of the most curious alpacas on her head, who had meandered all the way from the corral to greet us. I decided that moment that I loved him. The elderly couple had asked us what our jobs were, and we bored them to death in just a few short sentences. Then, embarrassed, we drove to our daily destination, a shabby motel in the outskirts of Whangamatā, and didn’t speak about the alpacas until getting back home, on this island battered by the winds and flotsam and jetsam. We decided to try and run the sheep farm that my grandfather had left me in his will, written just days before reaching whatever awaited him on the other side, hopefully something that looks like the Coromandel. Moving to the island had been easy, both materially and emotionally. Diving into our new life of sheep farming had been even easier.

I don’t see Jeroen’s bike when I arrive at the farm. Perhaps he’s not here yet.

The couple who really wanted to hold a lamb is waiting for me next to the little gate in front of the property. They have changed into comfier clothes, and both are now wearing hiking boots. I smile as I walk towards them, thinking about their perhaps alpaca farm in perhaps New Zealand. I ask them whether they want to hold another lamb, and they both smile embarrassedly. They say that this is actually why they have come back this morning, to apologize. For not understanding they were out of place, in the enclosure with all the kids and their parents and the lambs and myself. I tell them that they were not out of place, that the place was out of them. They do not understand. The husband, or perhaps boyfriend, certainly not brother, cocks his head slightly to the right and smiles. The eyes of the wife, or girlfriend, certainly not sister, are big, big. She also smiles, but almost as a reflex. The silence between the three of us acquires its own consistency, thicker than the mud under their more appropriate boots. On a whim I ask them if they are from New Zealand. They are surprised by the question, and the chasm between us deepens. The couple is now teetering between the polite and the apprehensive, their hands stuffed deep in the pockets of their thin parkas. They are certainly starting to regret having come back this morning. I told you that it was not a good idea, one will tell the other later in the day, perhaps. Wanting to offer them something pure and simple, I ask them whether they want to come in and see the piglets. Three, all small and pink and soft, I say. Born two days ago. They are clearly not enchanted by the idea, but are too well-mannered to simply take off. I can see the cogs whizzing behind their eyes as they try to find something to say to extricate themselves from the situation. To help them out a difficult decision, I make it for them.

“Come, this way,” I say, opening my arms wide to cut off any escape route, and encouraging them to turn on themselves and walk toward the entrance of the barn.

“On reste dix minutes, et après on se casse,” I hear the woman whisper to the man as they walk towards the large red door. French then. Or Swiss. Belgian? Certainly not Canadian. After removing the lock, I slide the large door open on its hinges. The inside is dark. Penumbra, Beto would have said. Penumbra. We enter. The sty is to the right, next to the gift shop and the entrance to the public area of the barn. I tell the French-Swiss-Belgian couple to wait there, and walk toward the gift shop, which is little more than a series of low tables overflowing with mugs and stuffed lambs and cringe magnets and that fucking beetroot jam that Oma Nijntje from three farms down the road begs me to try and sell. All of this is rammed behind two large privacy screens. I walk past the display tables and reach toward the back wall of the farm to turn on the neon lights that dangle from the ceiling, which flicker tentatively to life with a series of clicks. Three bulbs were dead yesterday as I turned off the lights, four are dead this morning. And counting. I make a mental note to tell Beto about the lights. A movement in my peripheral vision makes me abort the pivot towards the entrance of the barn where I left the French-Swiss-Belgian couple. Jeroen is rising slowly from behind one of the display cases, the one that holds the jams, piled in a sad pyramid. As he lunges towards me, I notice three odd things simultaneously. He is wearing the same clothes as the day before, which is odd because he is very fastidious about his appearance. He must have been sleeping in the gift store. One of Oma Nijntje’s beetroot jam jars, the pinnacle of the sad pyramid, is now lying empty on the floor next to the table, which is odd because everybody hates that fucking beetroot jam. He must have been hungry during the night. And he is holding a pitchfork, which is odd because Jeroen would never go anywhere close to actual physical work at the farm. He must have decided that yesterday’s rejection of his half-assed advances was one rejection too many.

Today is the day, then, I think. Today.

Jeroen lunges towards me in a liquid motion but is aiming a bit too low, and my half step back is sufficient for the three tips of the rusty pitchfork to pierce my upper thigh and not my defenseless abdomen. Time stops when the pitchfork impales me. We both look down, my arms pointing towards the gruesome spectacle just below my belt almost as if questioning its reality, Jeroen still holding the very tip of the handle of the pitchfork with both hands, his arms fully extended towards me. Then I feel like an invisible hand turned a master dial inside my head, and all strength leaves my legs. I fall on my knees, and the sudden movement jerks the impaling tool from my thigh. The pitchfork clatters on the ground with a clang, a sound followed by a rhythmic ploc ploc ploc as blood spurts in gushes from the wound and splats on the dirty ground of the barn. Aorta, I think, before the light goes out.

When I come to, the woman of the French-Swiss-Belgian couple is pushing down hard at my wound, trying to stop the blood from rushing out. She is doing a good job, I think, the wound has almost stopped hurting. I raise slowly on my elbows and see that Jeroen is lying face down on the floor, the pitchfork impaled deep into his nape like a flag planted on a new planet, a pool of blood starting to congeal under him.

“We called ze ambulans,” says the wife, or girlfriend, certainly not sister. Next to her, the husband, or perhaps boyfriend, certainly not brother, cradles a lamb in his arms and rocks it gently. The ball of bones and fluff, fast asleep, looks like the one they held the day before. Or perhaps not.

“He was afraid,” the woman says, perhaps referring to the lamb.

Alex Nai is a political scientist at the University of Amsterdam with extensive, award-winning expertise on the dark side of human nature. His fiction has been published in Litro, ANMLY, Umbrella Factory, and new_sinews. www.alexnaifiction.com