Chapter 12
We rode in the same (otherwise empty) car, but sat its length apart. Basil fumed by himself in his seat with his frill around his neck billowing in and out like a steam engine and with his lips too afraid to cover over his teeth. He clenched the seat in front of him with a grip that tore ragged gashes into the cushion. White stuffing bled from the rips and piled onto the seat. I didn’t have the nerve to sit near him. He didn’t seem to mind.
I thought of maybe talking to him, to try to temper his anger, but he had already gone beyond reason, where words became meaningless. All I heard him utter throughout the trip was a pressurized mix of English and Isian that leaked out in hisses. “She… I can’t believe… that stupid… there’s no way… I hate…” he drawled in stretches that melted together with random shrieks and squeals. He had skipped over the screaming, the cursing, and the screeching anger, where no vocalization could express the anger. It horrified me because the muted rage is most terrifying by far.
I stayed quiet on the train since there was nowhere to run.
Christ, this wasn’t supposed to happen! This wasn’t cute, this wasn’t benign, and it sure as hell wasn’t normal. I truly believed, as I sat trembling in my seat, that scaled ball of fury was preparing for some unspeakable evil. In my hopes, the seat cushion would be the only casualty for the day.
“Basil, listen little buddy,” I called out to him when the train stopped and he ran out. “There’s a good explanation for everything, right?”
He skipped down the stairs, jumped off the railings halfway down, and landed with a thump. In my attempt to keep pace, I tried calling out a few more times in between breaths. I caught the time before I left the station. It was almost two. The chase back to home was the most exhausting eight minutes of my life.
Basil made a merciful pause at the entrance to the apartments. My lungs gasped for air, and I stooped to rest my hands on my knees. Basil’s nostrils flared open and shut and his chest heaved as he snorted in deep breaths, but they clearly weren’t from exhaustion. His teeth struck together and made a sinister “chit-chit” that sounded like knives tapping against each other. He stared at the doors. I held out my hand to him and prepared my lungs with enough breath to say something, but a shout disrupted me from above. I looked up and found a fat finger pointed accusingly at me.
“Ivano! I knew it! Ya know the goddamn rules, no pets allowed! What the hell is wrong with you? Get that little shit out of here!”
I waved my hands to my manager in defense and wasted the saved air. “No sir, you don’t understand. It isn’t that at all. Look, I can explain, just let—”
“What? You listenin’ to me? I told you to get that shit out of here. Get it out, now!”
“Sir, please, let me explain.”
“Explain? So you wanna do that, huh?” He balanced like a circus elephant on one leg, so that he could remove his slipper from the other, and then shook a shoe at me. “I’ll explain you somethin’, goddamn asshole.”
Utter panic filled me when he stormed into his cave, and when I saw a swinging door where Basil should have been, I made a beeline inside.
I just glimpsed Basil down the hallway when a room one’s door suddenly opened in front of me. The landlord lumbered out and gave me a courtesy scowl before he ran down the hall with a slipper waving in his hand. I ran after him and yelled for him to stop, but it fell on numb ears. He caught up to Basil as the Isian was waiting at the elevator. Basil looked surprised when the landlord wedged in front of him and made shooing motions with the slipper right into his face.
“Get out!” the manager yelled. “Get outta here you slimy bastard! Go! Get out, now!”
Basil stepped back and looked confused, initially. He then began to look more and more agitated. His teeth bared, and a growl reverberated from his throat. He widened his stance and arched down. The manager continued to curse and shake the floppy slipper around. My heart threatened to break through my chest and explode.
“Please, sir,” I said in a cracked voice. “Just leave him alone. He won’t be a problem anymore, I promise you.”
He turned to me and roared. “You had ya chance! I’m takin’ care of the trash that you won’t! I own this goddamn place and I’ll have respect!” The slippers he held shook uncontrollably and his veins popped from his arms like blue straws. When he focused back on Basil, he blew up in an incoherent stream of screams and obscenities. The theatrics had gone off the rails, and he lost it. A thick wad of spit struck Basil between his eyes, and sickening spasms struck my stomach when I heard the sharp thwaps of the slipper striking his skull. The landlord wailed on him like a maniac.
I had to brace against the wall when the crash came, a force that shook the hallway and almost knocked me off-balance. When I steadied myself, the landlord was slumping against the wall with his ass to the floor and his eyes rolled over and dazed. A crack on the wall had formed behind his head. He blinked a few times and shook his head, and his eyes flew open when he noticed the sea of teeth that threatened to swallow his entire face. Trembling, he parted his mouth as if to say something, but Basil started first with a pernicious growl that rumbled deep into bone. Sharp claws punctured through the manager’s undershirt and buried into his chest. Saliva had pooled inside the lizard’s open mouth and streamed down onto his face. The crack slowly crept up to the ceiling.
I watched, paralyzed.
Basil pressed his snout to the landlord’s shivering face. The Isian curled back his lips and spoke in a murmur: “Go away.”
The landlord nodded without a word. When the elevator doors opened, Basil released him, turned and slapped the landlord on the stomach with his sweeping tail, and went inside. The manager watched and, only when the doors fully closed, bolted back to his room with his only shoe on his feet. The crack grew and bisected the entire hallway when he slammed the door to his room shut.
I took the stairs up. The door to my room was open and made tinny whirrs trying to close itself. I peeked inside and found Basil brooding in a darkened corner of the living room. He lay taciturn with his eyes glaring at the window, not rustling a bit when I snuck in and found the couch. I dared not make eye contact, even though I wanted to look into his unblinking eyes. I dared not speak, even though I wanted say the world to calm him. I dared not move, even though I wanted to run away. These were not the heroics Lyle was designed for. All I could do was wait and let my stomach boil and eat itself. Silence filled those acid-burned holes for the following two hours.
The creep to the half-hour tortured me. The raw nerves that inflamed my body contradicted Basil, who hadn’t twitched a muscle. God, who in the hell was supposed to be the emotional wreck here?
Maybe I’m sensationalizing all this, I thought. Yes, maybe that’s it. Maybe things won’t be so bad. Look at Basil, he doesn’t look that angry anymore. Muddled and quiet, yes, but probably not angry. Especially not with his sister. They’re twin siblings, for God’s sakes, and rather clingy ones at that. Tia will come back, they’ll have a little heart-to-heart, and everything will be all right. Just peachy. Nothing to worry about. No, nothing at all. He’s good and decent, a friend, everything will be fine. He’s good and decent, a friend, everything will be fine. I repeated it in my head as if was the family prayer.
Dread filled me when the clock turned four. I soon heard the tinny clanking of rusted metal from outside the window, my instinct told me to jump into a safe hiding spot. The clanking grew louder and humming soon joined it. The hum became milky and singsong as it neared, a tune to sing while drifting among clouds. The feminine notes of the humming swelled when the clanks stopped and the window opened. The sound compelled me to jump to a safe hiding spot, but my nerves anchored me in for the ride.
A bag was thrown inside. So preoccupied with her humming, Tia seemed blinded to me in her climb in. She closed the window with a flourish that caused her tail to bounce up and tap the ceiling. Her hands lingered on the window pane, and she ended her hum with a sigh and a giggle. She saw me when she turned to pick up the bag and yelped.
“Ly-lee? What are you doing back so early?”
I nodded over to Basil in an attempt to warn her. She didn’t understand, so I intensified the motions and wound up cricking my neck. She tilted her head at me, confused.
“Oh, good to see you back, Tia. We missed you all day,” a voice called out from the corner of the room. Tia straightened her back and froze. One of her ears twitched toward the voice. Then, her eyes widened in realization. She let the bag slip back to the ground and pivoted to face the voice. Basil roused up from his corner.
“Oh, hey, little brother!” Tia said. “I didn’t see you there. How are you? You look good, I think.”
A smile wrinkled up her face in patches, the kind you wear when telling your girlfriend how skinny she is.
Basil returned with a smile of his own, one that seemed the entirety of his lips and overflowed his face like kabuki paint. The smile grew more grotesque as he came closer his sister. By the time he was hovering over her face, he looked like someone who had hit jackpot and murdered a hooker in Vegas.
“I’m very good,” he said. He looked over Tia’s head. “And you Sis, you look good too! Better than this morning, I think. Much better. It’s like you couldn’t even tell that you were even sick. How did get so much better so fast?”
Tia opened her eyes wider and stepped a bit away from him. Basil’s eyelids narrowed, but his smile kept while he waited for his sister’s reply. Tia came closer to me tried to crack another smile that fooled nobody. She tittered.
“Heh, funny thing about that,” she said. “I was pretty sick this morning, but I suddenly got better after you guys left. But you guys were already gone so…” She batted her eyes away from Basil and laughed again.
“And so you just wanted to go out and meet new friends, or something?” Basil asked.
“Well, I just thought maybe I wanted some air, that’s all. That’s what Arlene always says right? Get some healthy air for a healthy body? It’s good air outside.”
“Oh yeah, sure. It smells very good outside.”
He circled around Tia and fixated on her face again. Tia backpedalled, and when Basil leaned his snout close to her neck, she struck the couch with a yap. She squeezed her eyes closed and squirmed when Basil dug his nose into flesh of her neck. He wriggled his nostrils after absorbing her smell, saying “Ah, I smell it too. I smell the air. I also smell a lot of other things.”
Tia pulled her neck away and left his nose sniffing at dead space. She slid along the couch and stopped against my leg. “Wha—… what do you mean?”
“I smell other things. Good things like nice air and good food and you and Ly-lee.” He turned away from us and snorted, a banshee’s sneeze that dusted off the coffee table in a cloud of debris. “And I smell bad things too. Dirt and mud and nasty air and honeydew…”
When he turned back, the smile had disappeared.
“And I smell someone I don’t like.”
Tia pressed harder against my leg and almost tripped over, forcing me to catch her. I felt her heart thrash in my palm, which pressured my hand away when I sat her back up. Back on her feet, Tia just stared at her brother’s glower, seemingly frozen and unable to think of what say. His continuing glare, however, finally forced her words out.
“W-well, I think I’m pretty tired now, I think,” she said, her nervousness wracking her voice in stutters. “I think I’m going to go… r-rest for a little bit. Yes, I think so. I should go to bed.”
She nodded and went around the table. Basil jumped over it to block her.
“Why did you go there?” he demanded.
“I d-don’t know… I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know where you went. I have the logs from your tracking module to prove it. I know you lied to me.”
“I didn’t lie to you.”
“Yes you did! And you lied to Ly-lee too! That’s even worse!”
Tia glanced at me. I shook my head. I wasn’t sure what I was denying.
“Basil, little brother. It’s… it’s not what you think at all.”
“Then what is it? What’s so bad that you can’t tell me? Are you going to tell me the truth now?”
She parted her mouth to speak but stopped and turned away. She shut her eyes and whimpered.
Basil snorted at her. “It was him, huh?” he said, his voice indignant and accusing. “It is! I smell him all over you. You went out to the zoo just to see that guy. You lied to me and went to see him anyway. You lied to me. To us!”
I could hear her gulp from across the room. Her chest was billowing quick breaths that matched her trembling. The muscles of her face contorted under the stress of her squeezing eyelids, and she began to sniffle. It was something I’ve seen before. I wanted to call out to her and make it all go away. I wanted to be the hero again. I wanted everything to be all right. Her claws grasped her own forearms and begged for someone to hold onto. I wanted to be the one that held her. Her eyelids puffed and swelled. I wanted to be the one to stop from exploding tears.
But I couldn’t be a hero, because when her eyes reopened, it wasn’t tears that filled them.
Tia’s brows pinched down and formed into a cutting taper that matched the teeth her lips unfurled to bare. She postured her hands and feet to the floor and tensed her body like a rock of muscle, and her tail followed its momentum and struck the wall with a thump. Basil yipped back when she snarled and hardened her voice to say, “So what if I did?”
Basil gaped at her with an open mouth, but his surprise withered after a few seconds. He dropped on all fours and snorted back.
“So it’s true, then!” he said. “It was him, you admit it! So what horrible things did you to with him, huh?”
“That’s none of your business. I can do what I want. You can’t tell me what to do.” Her voice birthed a snarl, which would feed and grow on the escalating argument.
“I can’t believe you! All this time, I thought you finally got the point. But no, you’re just as stupid as I thought you were!”
“Better be stupid than be lonely! Just because you can’t sing and find a mate doesn’t mean I have to be the same!”
“I… you!”
Tia hopped onto the table with the grace and attitude of the queen of the beasts. She bowed down and sneered at her brother with royal contempt. Basil’s jaws snapped together and seemed to want to say something, but he didn’t have any words to feed them. He jostled about and shook some out.
“He’s not even anything like you!” he cried. “Nothing! He doesn’t look like you, he doesn’t come from the same place you do, he isn’t as smart as you are, and he’s ugly! Why do you care about someone like that?”
Spreading her limbs out to balance her entire weight on the table, Tia snarled and flared out her frill. Her tail undulated in front of me like a ball-and-chain looking for a skull to bash in. Her brother returned the stance, and they glared and growled at each other like lions ready to pounce. The anger that bit into their words reverberated in a predatory echo chamber, bouncing and growing by feeding upon each other.
“Stop being so jealous of him, Ba-sil-isk,” Tia said, spitting his name out in mutilated bits.
“I won’t let you see him again!”
“You can’t stop me from seeing him! You can’t stop me from seeing anybody!”
She nudged back her feet and tiptoed at the edge of the table. With her head kept low, she arched her back, tucked her tail between her legs, and rose her bottom into the air until her rump was at my eye level. A click of her tongue, and she slammed the tail on the tabletop.
“I can go to any male I want to,” she said. She uncovered a teeth-filled smile. “And you know what I’m going to do for them, little brother?”
She niggled her rump a bit higher and, in an act that I could not un-see, whipped her tail out from under her and straight into the air. Clearer than anything I wished to witness, her femininity danced for my attention as she wiggled her hips. My neck didn’t allow my head to turn far enough away, and neither could my nostrils open wide enough to let me wheeze out my shock. I dug my feet into the armrest and pushed myself away as far as I could from the sight.
“I’m going to do this, and there’s nothing you can do about it!” she yelled.
I guess that’s what it’s ultimately like to have a close sibling. On the best of days, you had a friend for life, someone that will always be there come hell or high water, and someone that, despite knowing all your most intimate quirks and deviances, will always come to your aid. But on the worse of days, that same person will exploit those same quirks to gouge your nerves, like no one else could, until you begged the demons of hell to drag you into the pits. Tia knew this. She designed her act like a laser-guided missile to strike maximum insult. She was a masterful engineer.
I eyed Basil to focus away from Tia’s display. Disbelief ballooned his eyes into huge orbs. He began to shiver. And then his frill flew open and his tail flailed. Soon, his whole body rattled with an earthquake of rage. His anger wheezed in bursts that prevented him from retaining enough air in his lungs to speak.
“You… I… sometimes I wish… sometimes I wish I never had a sister!”
“Sometimes I wish I never had a brother, because then I would still have a mother!”
He screamed.
The cacophony that followed forced me to grip my ears to hollow out the madness, yet it still punctured through and battered my ears. I tucked in my body and dug my head over into my knees in the hope that the ringing would soon stop. It was all black. When I finally looked up, I saw one of the Isians leaning out the window and howling its lungs out. The other was gone. The one remaining one slammed the window back down. It had no collar.
I shot up and ran to the window. “Tia? Tia! Stop, come back!” I yelled. It was the first thing I said since coming back home, hours all too late. I opened the still-quavering window and poked out my head to find her. I called out for her again, but the only response was echoes.
“Oh forget about her!” Basil said. “She’s gone. She doesn’t want to be here anyway because we’re not good enough for her.”
I swallowed, desperately trying to get moisture down to my sandpapered throat, only to choke on a ball of air. My back found the wall and I fell down. The truth wasn’t supposed to be this way!
Basil continued mumbling.
“Stupid girl. I don’t even know what her problem is. He’s not even Isian. Stupid Tia.”
“We have to find her,” I said. “She’s out there all alone!”
“Bah, she’ll be back. Just wait a few hours. She’ll realize how wrong she is and she’ll come back feeling sorry and then she’ll finally figure out how dumb this whole thing is. I know her.”
“But why? What did she do to deserve this?”
“What do you mean ‘why?’ Wouldn’t you? You saw her, always going on and on and on about that guy like he was the best thing in that world. They’re not even anything alike!”
“Look Basil… little buddy, I know Sydney’s not up to Tia’s level, but that’s just what he is. You can’t possibly take that out against him because of that.”
He looked at me in utter puzzlement. “What are you even talking about? Who’s Sydney?”
“Sydney, from the zoo.” I said. He still didn’t seem to understand, so I clarified, “The komodo dragon that Tia’s seeing.”
“The dragon? That Sydney?” He snorted and thumped his tail to the floor. “Who cares about that stupid lizard? We’re talking about Brian!”
After I sealed myself in my room to avoid a Basilisk still rambling off his steam, I found myself sitting on the edge of my bed next to the nightstand and staring at a photograph in my hands for, God, it must have been hours. Maybe that’s how the blind must feel when science or the supernatural finally blesses them with the gift of vision. They must spend hours just savoring the sights of a world once unknown. I understood it as I sat on the bed and tried to burn the image into my retina. It eventually damaged the details and cooked everything into a homogenous blur, but a single spot of the photo remained raw. I wanted to throw it out, crush it, compost it, make it rot into nothingness. But it lingered there, taunting me with brown eyes and smiling lips.
The dragon was the first thing that had burned away into a crisp.
Dear Tia, I hope you’re having a good time at Tetra. You’re always welcome back to the here anytime. Yours truly, the Hamilton-Wyvern World Zoo, it said on the back of photo. An intimate message signed off with something like you would find on the letterhead of a subpoena. What a joke.
I stared at the photograph, away from where the lizard lay and to the creature that lurked next to him, something I had been blind to all this time. It hid camouflaged itself as any true predator would, with its khaki uniform blending itself against the dusty grass. All this time, I’ve been worried about the pussycat when the lion was stalking in the shadows. Homo sapiens brians. All this fucking time.
God! What was going on here? Brian? That Brian? That’s her paramour? I’ve heard fairy tales of love not knowing any boundaries, but I figured the world had since outgrown such juvenility. You know what else have no sense of boundaries? Bullies and stalkers. And I didn’t know if I was comfortable living in a world where love is serving thirty-seven years for assault and sexual battery.
Was she really in love with him? Does that work? Can that work? Love between a human and a… lizard? Jesus Christ, my head was reeling just thinking of it. Even considering it. How can such an abomination exist? Maybe it was something in her system—something she ate, some weird hormone, or perhaps the cosmic background radiation. Maybe it was for practical reasons, because if you had no suitors of your own species available, you’d probably be driven to situational interspecies relationships too. Maybe she was under the influence of mind control, that could be it. Brian’s after something. What kind of sicko would go after a lizard, anyway? That couldn’t be fucking legal. I mean, is it even possible for a human and an Isian to physically—
No! God no! I was over-thinking things; there must have been a reasonable explanation. Brian probably doesn’t even know that a female lizard has a crush on him. Young girls go through sweethearts like toiletry, after all. Wipe ’em off and go onto the next sheet. In a week, fleeting love will flush the poor bastard down to the sewer of heartbreak.
I hoped. God, dear God, I hoped.