Elliot The Otter

A school bus full of fourth-graders from a small town drove through a large city on its way back from a field trip. Amelia Jenkins tugged on the sleeve of her mother’s pink fleece pullover. “Look, mom, look at the buildings! They’re so tall!” Amelia had never seen such buildings up close before, and doing so excited her to no end.

“I know,” said her mother, who had come along as a chaperone. “Oh, look at that black one, Amelia! It’s really tall.”

Amelia’s dark blonde bangs, cut just a bit too short, we full of static from pressing her face so close to the window. “What are they used for?” She asked, “do people live in them?”

“I think these ones are all office buildings, honey.”

“You don’t know that they are, though. People might live in some of them.”

“That’s true, people might.”

People certainly did live in one of them, several streets down, and sixteen-year-old Jenna Conrad watched the sun set from the small deck of her family’s ninth-floor two-bedroom. The moon had made an early appearance that evening, and being just between half and full gave it an awkward, rather adolescent appearance. An airplane appeared to fly over it, and Jenna remembered once having a dream as a child in which both the moon and an additional moon made out of clay, called “The Clay Moon” came out in the sky at night, so close that she could touch them.

The airplane looked like a friendly alligator or a pointy-faced sea lion. When Jenna looked up towards the sky she could see it flying away from her, and when she looked sideways, she could see that her neighbors one apartment building over were watching TV. Her mother called her in for dinner then. Dinner was lasagna, and afterwards Jenna would lie down in the bed that she shared with her two-year-old sister, Lila, and watch silly Disney channel shows made for preteens until they both fell asleep. The double-sized mattress in the middle of the room was surrounded by a messy sea of clothes and fashion magazines and bottles of nail polish remover, packages of Dora The Explorer pull-ups and bedraggled old Barbie dolls. Neither Jenna nor Lila knew that every night their mother waded through this sea to kiss them both on their dark, wavy heads. When they woke, though, invariably, the overhead light was turned off and the television set was muted.

A girl from America and a boy from Ireland, both in their twenties, stared down up-close at the wing of the aforementioned plane, watching the metal’s plain gray flash a lovely red, on and off, as the city gradually grew up before them from beneath the moon and clouds. They had become friends over the course of the flight, and discussed the difference in people’s accents. I am here, the Irish boy thought, and the America girl thought, I am home.

In the midst of all of this, just as all of it was happening, Vivian was shaking hands with Matty Madison from Minnesota and Pippin Noelle from Kansas. The singers, ages twenty-three and thirty, respectively, were each just a few inches taller than Vivian--four inches, five maybe?--and in possession of wonderfully frail-looking arms. She had always found such arms attractive--there was an unmistakable masculinity to arms like theirs that so many people missed because no one ever let them figure out masculinity, or figure out anything for that matter, on their own. Vivian noticed, though, for once a person sees things they can never unsee them again, and for all the pain this causes it is a blessing. The pain was tangible, edible almost in its wonderfulness.

The tour kicked off that night in San Diego, but the three musician hadn’t actually gotten a chance to meet until after the show. That night’s venue had been the largest Matty or Vivian had ever played, all balconies and bouncers and screaming kids, so both of them felt rather high from the experience and nowhere near ready for bed. A virtuous collection of backing musicians had helped ease their nerves, so there hadn’t been any emotional breakdowns pre-performance.

The thirty-year-old singer remembered doing embarrassing things like that, and as a result he was slightly wary of touring with such young kids. In the past two years he had grown accustomed to the same two opening bands, both of which were made up of men his own age or slightly older. Neither band was able to make it this time--no, member of both groups were beginning to do stupid things like get married and father babies--and he missed them dearly. Vivian and Matty would probably want to go to the bars, Pippin thought tiredly. He worried that they might get horrifically drunk in every city on the tour and that he would have to deal with tears, and puke, and all sorts of other things he hadn’t signed up for.

Matty, however, had other plans. “I read online that the zoo is having a special night time exhibit of nocturnal animals,” he said. “Do you guys like animals?”

“I love animals” said Vivian. She was the sort of person who wouldn‘t even buy leather shoes. “They make me really like the world, you know? The fact that all these cool, absurd-looking creatures exist makes me happy. I know some people think that zoos and aquariums are immoral, but I just kind of go anyway and hope they’re not. I guess I can allow myself that one slight lapse in social awareness.”

Pippin smiled genuinely for the first time all day. Matty’s suggestion for that night’s activity charmed him, Vivian’s clever eloquence intrigued him, and both made him feel as if maybe they wouldn’t be such insufferable tour-mates after all.

The trio decided to fill their stomachs at a diner before the zoo excursion, where all three ordered bad mixed drinks. They all picked at one giant plate of fries, which Vivian hoped were, in fact, vegan, though she wasn’t so sure.

Matty looked up at the buggy overhead light, biting his lip a little. “Diners kind of bum me out,” he said. His speaking voice had a mildly nasal, Midwestern quality to it that Vivian found cute and Pippin found comforting.

“How come?” Vivian asked.

“Its just that, um, well--my brother Elliot, he died when he was twenty, I was sixteen. He and I used to go to diners all the time. This one summer, we did. I mean its stupid, its not a big deal or anything. I just kind of miss him a lot.”

Coming from almost anyone else, such a morose declaration within the first few hours of knowing someone would come off as an obnoxious and possibly unstable bid for attention, but Matty was so blatantly sincere and sad about it that neither of his companions felt annoyed or leery. It was very obvious, even in the short time they’d been acquainted, that Matty was endearingly devoid of a lot of the hipster social conventions that most people had, and that no one had ever given him the memo that talking about your feelings wasn’t always okay. Both Vivian and Pippin had been chastised for doing so in the past, and it had hurt.

“Aw, Goddamn,” said Pippin, squinting one eye in the way he did when something moved him. He hoped that the story wasn’t a terribly sad one, because for all his jadedness he was still embarrassingly tenderhearted. “You should have said something. We can go to other kinds of restaurants from now on, if you want. Oh! We can go to Mexican ones! Caliente, mi amigos!”

The entire table laughed then at the sound of someone with a bit of a Midwestern lilt trying to affect a Spanish accent, and Pippin was glad that he had successfully deflected the possible sob story with humor. During all of this Vivian had said nothing, but had taken Matty’s hand under the table and held it firmly in both of hers. Although she was, of course, never sad herself, it wasn’t impossible for her to be moved by the sadness of others, and she didn’t like to see it.
Matty smiled and changed the subject. “Why are we all wearing black, you guys? We’re really not that famous."

“Yeah, I kind of doubt anyone in here has any idea who we are” said Vivian, looking around. She liked it when normality was tangible, and tried to surround herself with it more often than with what she perceived to be the opposite. Besides, indie-fame was a bizarre phenomenon in which one had a ridiculous level of celebrity in the eyes of a specific portion of people and to the rest of the world was absolutely no one. Musicians whose fans waited in huge lines outside of venues to see them could walk through airports undisturbed.

Pippin lowered his sunglasses over his eyes. “Speak for yourselves, guys,” he said. “These truckers love me. I have to come incognito or they mob me for autographs, saying my albums make them cry.” He was feeling increasingly optimistic, now, about touring with such lighthearted, intelligent people, even if they were a little bit young. He could make jokes like this around them without having to worry about being mistaken for an asshole.


They took a cab to the zoo. It was all lit up with white Christmas tree lights, making it look cartoonish and ethereal. Polar bears and harp seals slept behind walls of glass, the bright colors emanating from tourists’ sweatshirts and reflecting onto them, in those lights, making them look like Lisa Frank drawings.

Vivian looked around at the people. “We should have worn different clothes,” she said. She had a thing about being mistaken for normal sometimes when she went places like restaurants or zoos--it gave her an indescribable feeling that she liked, though for all her wordiness she couldn’t articulate why, exactly, she liked it. She, Pippin, and Matty, in their snug-fitting black pants and black zip-up sweatshirts, stuck out like sore indie rock star thumbs amidst all the fleece pullovers , lounge pants and souvenir sweatshirts.

“Yeah,” said Matty, eyeing a harp seal, “I guess we could have worn pajamas or something. That might have been cool.”

Pippin only smiled. Thirty really isn’t terribly old, in the grand scheme of things, and just beneath the very thin layer of elusiveness that permeated his persona, he was remarkably easily charmed, and had already been sufficiently won over.

The bears and seals may have slept, but the creatures of the night stared wild-eyed back at their admirers from shadowy habitats. Huge owls hooted hello from black branches with the silhouettes of dogs and forests, and strange, hunched monkeys looked out at them, unblinking and devious. An anteater scoured the ground of it’s small habitat for food, so bizarre-looking that it shouldn’t even actually exist, it seemed like.

Hot tea was ordered from one of the stands in the food court, and they sat on a high grass hill to drink it, looking down upon the chilly, dark zoo ablaze with its white lights and brightly-colored patrons. Vivian, who always carried an old copy of Maeterlinck’s The Life of Space around in her purse, looked up at the sky.

For centuries, it seemed, there had been nothing to do but look up at the stars, making up stories about them and what they might be, naming the constellations. The twentieth century came, then, all cynicism and technology, changing everything.

“I’m glad I can say things like that to you guys,” she said, when she had told them. “Other people immediately accuse me of being contrived when I do, or being a cliché, or trying to be deep. They never believe that its just how I feel. It’s kind of frustrating.” And she was brave then, because there was no guarantee that Matty or Pippin weren’t among those masses after all, that they wouldn’t sneer and make acerbic comments, insinuating that she had no real intelligence or originality--though she hadn’t claimed to.

Pippin ran a hand through the back of his light brown hair. It was a nervous mannerism he had picked up somewhere along the line. “It’s tough, I think” he began, “when there’s like, the mainstream and the counterculture, and you feel really… really alienated from both sides. If that makes sense. At least that’s how it was for me. Or is, I guess, its still that way for me, a lot.”

“Yeah, but if you really get to know most people from either side, if you even take a second to do it, so many of them are lovely. I hate that shit where you have to be mean and unhappy to be perceived as smart. It makes me so, so annoyed.”

Matty, who so far had said nothing, piped up then. A plane, or rather the lights of one, for the plane itself could not be seen, was going by, very high up. “I used to imagine, as a kid, that I could grab planes down out of the sky. I used to think that maybe that was where dead people went, and that you could grab them down for a minute and hold the plane in your hands and have them back. But now I wonder if maybe they’re animals--like sea animals, maybe. Like Elliot now. I wonder if he’s a seal.”

“It never stops bugging you, does it?” asked Pippin, who had a brother of his own. For a fraction of second he imagined how he might react if his own brother died, but he didn’t like the feeling of imagining that at all, so he stopped.

“No… I mean, I don’t know how it is for other people. And I don’t mean to keep bringing it up, sorry. But um… God, I’m sorry if this is weird for you guys, but I have a heart condition. I mean, a lot of the stupid interviews and stuff have mentioned it, so you might already know. It’s a genetic thing, kind of, and Elliot had it, too. So like… I never know how long its going to be, or how old I’m going to get. I mean its not a death sentence, per say… I could live to be old with it for all I know, especially since I had surgery as a kid and everything. But I could not, too. That can be a weird thing to come to terms with. It doesn’t make you any less scared, having something like that.”

Pippin muttered “fuck”, turning away and biting his lip. He hated his feelings. He didn’t even know the goddamn kid.

“God…” said Vivian, looking down. “Do you guys do drugs at all? Cocaine and stuff, I mean. You guys do that sometimes, don’t you?”

Pippin squinted. “Yeah, I do. I mean, shit… its not something I’m proud of. I don’t it as much as I used to.”

Matty shrugged. “I’ve tried it before.”

Vivian lay down in the cold grass. “Elliot,” she said, “Elliot the otter.”

Back at the tour bus, Pippin showed Matty and Vivian how the couch in the back room folded out into a bed. Most of the blankets he owned had been given to him by promotional companies, or stolen from hotels, so they were all solid colors or very muted stripes or plaids. Matty and Vivian, being less experienced, had brought their blankets from home, and many of them bore the pictures of odd, comforting looking cartoon characters, faded and slightly retro. Pippin nearly laughed out loud, seeing those blankets fill up the back room of his tour bus, with the fold-out bed so big that it filled the entire space up all the way to the door.

Vivian and Matty turned on the television and were laughing at one of those stupid shows in which a low-level celebrity tries to find love within a group of really obnoxious people. Pippin told them goodnight and went to his bunk. He wasn’t nearly as promiscuous on tour as he’d once been, and though Vivian was pretty, on principal he didn’t sleep with his tour mates. This was one of many recently-developed courtesies--he certainly hadn’t adhered to it at the beginning of his career. Besides, she and Matty looked rather cute lying there together. Something about Vivian reminded Pippin of his very first girlfriend, though she hadn’t been as little, and her hair had been different, since Vivian had the kind of bangs that only appear on the very hip and the very unhip. Still, there was something similar--maybe the nose.

Vivian made a mental note of the fact that all the shows of this nature had the word love in the title. Maybe this was why she had renounced her belief in love of the romantic sort. It was completely created, she reasoned, manmade. Of course there was biology, which made you want to have sex with certain people, and of course there was love. The two coincided sometimes, which was nice, but that was just a lucky accident--it couldn’t be forced or searched for, and it certainly wasn’t necessary. The love that one might happen to feel for someone with whom they wanted have sex wasn’t any different than the love one felt for their mother, or a baby, or their best platonic friend. It was real, anyway, and that was all that should matter as far as Vivian was concerned. The entire world, spinning on its axis and full of zoo animals and restaurants and favorite singers, was made out of it.

She liked to tell herself that this was the reason, anyway. There were other reasons, too. The entire concept of love had been cheapened by the many ridiculous media circuses bearing its name. The word itself had been throw around so freely before a generation’s eyes that it had almost ceased to mean anything. Besides, Vivian wasn’t particularly good at it. She’d gotten sick of hoping for things that never happened and getting excited about things that inexplicably crashed and burned in a matter of weeks, so she’d just stopped trying.

The bus began to move. Matty sat up and looked out the window at the lights of cars and buildings going past. “Cool,” he whispered. He turned to Vivian, laughing at the TV. “Can we change this shit?”

“Please.”

They channel surfed until they found Mister Rogers Neighborhood and fell asleep, not touching, to a woman talking about how sleeping bags were made in factories and the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. And right there, in the back room of the tour bus, Vivian opened up her mind again to the possibility of loving someone she might also be attracted to. When they woke in the morning, somehow, the overhead lighting was gone and the television set was turned off.