At what point we started to date I don’t really remember for sure. It all just kind of happened the same way my earliest memories all just kind of happened back when I was two or three. One minute everything was blank and dark and peopleless and dull and the next it just coalesced around me into raw disfiguring light, already full of life and happenings with a mom and an older sister and some homemade toys and a bedroom and a Caligulan hamster and a big wooden TV, borne about the same way an amusement park looks from the seat of an octopus ride. So when all that spinning finally came to an end and everything settled into place, I carefully picked myself off the carpet and went along with it. That’s just the type of person I am. I don’t bother with all the details about what came first or what came before. Even particular appetites—both during my broad introduction to Penny and my bright, chaotic burst into toddlerhood—seemed to be already there waiting for me, broggling my stomach like a sharpened stick into an eel, already expecting me to act in a certain way and feel things in a certain way. So that’s what I did.
Penny was living in one of the Onion Creek neighborhoods in the southeast corner of Austin when this turning happened again, and I was drawn from the deepest, boskiest glen of my boredom into a moment I was wholly unprepared for in many ways and yet for decades had been preparing myself for in others. I was sitting at the side of an orange velvet couch in a sunken living room, already holding a bagged thirty-two ounce can of Miller High Life and watching her bottle-feed Daniel with some kind of red purée of soft tissue and blood from an animal that, I pretty much suspected, would change from week to week depending on whatever she could buy cheap from the horsebreeders to the east of the creek or whatever she could dumpster from the H-E-B.
Penny was already answering my question but as she registered the shock across my face, her voice slowed then stopped. “That’s not gonna be a problem, is it?” she asked. When Daniel started to grunt again, she lowered her eyes and pulled the bottle out of his throat and resituated him in her arm like a monstrous baby.
And with that, the dull light from her windows turned and sank.
The most surprising thing about Penny is that for as closely knitted as her neighborhood had been, she and Daniel inspired virtually no legend for all the strangeness that sheeted about them like a mist of hemolymph and mouthparts. And months after the floodwaters had retreated towards the Gulf of Mexico, and the city and FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers had bought out most of her neighbors and torn down their shitty little tract houses and towed out their shitty little trailers, nobody seemed to remember much about the pair. There was no family I’d ever heard of, and when FEMA reached out to me at Ego’s one Wednesday night while I was hungover and stoned, stocking the slide-top coolers below the backbar, I felt just as mazy about the truth of her origins as if her caseworker had asked me what genus Daniel actually belonged to. “She never mentioned any family,” I said into my phone. More words piled up in the receiver. “No, she never mentioned that either. I don’t know where she came from.”
But the facts about Penny, let alone Daniel, don’t add up to much by way of love. And I did love her. I’m pretty sure of that. Love’s something that can’t come from anywhere but you. It’s just something that has to develop naturally and organically if that makes any sense. Her property was situated far from the rest of her downsloping neighborhood inside a dark clearing in the woods where her three rundown little buildings and her yard came more or less incidental to the old gnarled trees and the canebrake that framed them. You really wouldn’t know it was back there if you weren’t looking for it, and sometimes, during the ranker seasons, the foliage grew so dense about her thin bowered driveway, maybe thirty yards from end to end, that it seemed to disappear like a vein collapsing onto itself. Her boxy little house, on the other hand—with its pink stucco walls, sprent black with mold, and its broad mossbacked roof—had tenured its brief precarious life mostly unchoked from those creeping-eeping shoots and their creeping-eeping leaves and from the lofty canopy, ridden orange with dodder, that wove together thickly into something of a dome. And yet, despite all of this, despite the weak ambient light that leached in through the verge, when I found myself standing on her lawn with one hand in my jean jacket and the other waving up at them—and Penny bouncing Daniel in her arm and waving back from her small kitchen window—her home seemed to glow all its own. Like how some toadstools glow foxfire on rotting wood.
About my earliest memories let me just say this before I get back to what I really want to tell you: in my Aunt Jolene’s dining-room salon, where her customers sat in stiff electrical chairs with big plastic globes fixed around their setting perms, or during my birthday party at ShowBiz Pizza and its ratchety band of animatronic bears and wolves, the older I get the more I wonder if these images didn’t actually emerge from my brain at all or if some other factor didn’t come into play—if, say, the reels of home movies that my mom used to shoot on her little Super 8 didn’t place them there—and if a projector and a screen could have enough sway to trap me in their lurch and force into me memories that I, Brent Joseph Johnson, wouldn’t normally create, then maybe, perhaps, thirty years later or so, these fragments of my strange courtship with Penny could’ve also been deposited there by some outside factor as well. It’s entirely possible. Or even by internal ones. Like our weird little microbiomes of bacteria and viruses, fungi and mites, or the presence of our alien mitochondria, long naturalized deep inside our cells. Do you see what I’m saying? Because even though we tend to coalesce into bodies and minds and souls and everything, how much of our own tissue matter, let alone the senses that their organs create, have ever really belonged to us? It can’t be a hundred percent, now can it? And it was only later on when the remote Hill Country to the west of MoPac had somehow trapped those rainclouds above it, and those rainclouds had dumped that foot of water onto tens of hundreds of thousands of junipered acres, and all that goddamn water had come guttering down into the southeast corner of the city from all those goddamn rocks, and when South Boggy and Williamson and—more violently—Onion Creek had risen eleven feet in fifteen minutes and didn’t stop rising for several hours after that, overtaking any number of poor homes that’d clung to their brinks, well maybe it was only then did my brain start to fill in too, like those chaotic sounds and images were rising all around my generic thoughts, so it’s kind of fitting that when this flood had receded hours later, strange new memories were left behind like so much wreckage and horror deposited in the branches of all those startled trees.
Penny, my dove, had come to me prematurely aged like that one girl we all saw online several years ago. I can’t remember much about her except that she was in the sixth grade at the time of the school photo and that her aunt was responsible for how distorted she turned out in it: her curly blonde hair bouffanted up in that gauzy late-eighties fashion only girls with big ugly glasses seemed to wear, the slight tilt of her head, the surprised squinch of her eyes, the dull red lipstick that added maybe fifty years to her face. I remember that the original post also had a joke about osteoporosis captioned to it and that it was her husband who’d uploaded it to Facebook or Reddit as a joke or something til the joke went viral, and later on I read that they weren’t together anymore but I’m not really sure if that part’s true or not. Unlike the other girl, however, Penny only had herself to blame. She often dressed in tightfitting synthetic clothes, often pantsuits with odd stretchy materials as if the sixties had dispatched her from Galveston or Dallas: seafoams, apricots, flavids and mustards; avocados and oxbloods; foxalines and nylon rattlesnakes; bright metallic fabrics: lamés, sequins, sharkskins, spandex and foils. Her own hair would often be teased up under similarly pondered scarfs; her cat eye glasses; Shalimar, sea mist, hippomane; and her own loud thick makeup that threatened to metastasize across her dark round face. It was almost like I’d cut her out of an old fashion magazine back when magazines were still a thing and you could still cut things out of them, and she’d always have a good laugh when I’d wrap my arms around her throat and tell her that. But Daniel on the other hand, who’d grunt absently like he understood what I was talking about, was a little harder to pin down. He was unlike any other alligator I’ve ever seen before, and as I search my memory like I’m searching through a handful of marbled mirror, I can’t help wonder if he might’ve been something else entirely—like he fared more closely to a goblin or an imp where his trunk and his head and what remained of his lower mutilated jaw had developed much smaller than what his limbs should’ve warranted. From tip to tip he wasn’t much longer than three feet by guess with a tail that tapered off quickly and bluntly into a near perfect analogue of his olive blackish snout. And when she’d cradle him in her arms with his back pressed against her chest, the rubbery flesh of his belly would appear green in certain lights like the glandular skin of a frog and in others pale and clammy like that of a sickly baby.
Once, on my day off from the karaoke bar, I drove out to her house tucked back along the thick bird-haunted woods where I found her in her ancient chrome trailer that’d been transplanted to her backdoor with an airgate of awning fabric and aluminum floorboards. She was pouring bags of gas-station ice into one half of a big blue rain barrel, maybe two hundred gallons as-is, and as she finished with the last one, she turned back to the short tiled fountain along the hitch-side wall and lifted Daniel out of the heated water, the crook of her left arm tumped just below the ghast of his mouth and the other arm tumped just before his tail. “With crocodiles,” she brooded, “if the water gets too cold, they just sink to the bottom and drown.” Near the rain barrel he took his wet toothless snout up and over her ear and tried to nuzzle it there, but she grimaced and tilted away. “They’re really a lot different than alligators, oof. Less hardy. Alligators are chattier too which is nice.” Once again she moved her head away from him. “Especially when I’m here by myself.”
“Can they still have sex?”
“Maybe.” She turned to look at me and Daniel seemed to look at me too. “But reptiles don’t really work like that.”
“But if they did, can they still have babies?”
“No, they’re too genetically different.”
I shut off my phone and set it on the floor next to my sneaker. “Like if I try to knock up a chimpanzee?”
“Not even. They’re further apart than that.”
She slipped Daniel tail first into the water, and as he sank he turned angrily and slashed his tail at her hand, but by the time I pushed myself off the chair and crossed over to the barrel, he’d already turned placidly back around and lifted his snout partway into the air. The rest of his head, his eyes, however, remained submerged. “Alligators,” she added, “just take to the cold and go still.”
“You mean they brumate?”
“Yeah, look at you, Mister Smartypants. They brumate.”
Beyond her window a flock of lime-green parakeets fluxed in and out of her bushes. I hadn’t eaten all day unless you consider coffee and beer food and my stomach now mumbled and burbled its way into the conversation. “Why are you doing this again?”
“What with the barrel?”
“With the ice water and everything.”
“Well,” she said. Then she bent over and snatched a towel off the floor and straightened up again. “I figure I can travel more with him in it. He could stay like this for months and months and never have to eat.”
Again my stomach burbled and blarted.
“Won’t he just die?” I asked. “I mean who’s gonna replace the ice?”
She seemed to think about it for a moment, running the towel listlessly over her neck and face. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “That’s the rub. I still haven’t figured that part out yet.”
*
The following week we were sprawled out on a yellow picnic blanket near the eastern edge of her property. The air was hot and swampy and all around us, through the small breaks in the tree cover, shafts of sunlight meteorized to the ground. Dust and gnats rose and sank slowly among them.
“So it was a shotgun then?”
I still hadn’t touched any of the food she’d packed and I was lightheaded and euphoric from all the beers I’d been drinking. “Well that’s what the sheriff’s department thought,” I said, “but it could’ve been anything. I don’t really remember.”
“But why would they suspend you for that?”
“No, they suspended me because I forced Nick Wedel’s little brother to eat acid in the second part of my movie.”
“Oh well sure. That’ll…probably do it.”
Several feet away near the limestone birdbath, Daniel had situated himself in the largest patch of sunlight. Maybe two feet in diameter. He was dressed in a yellow t-shirt that Penny had bought off of Etsy, I think, but she’d turned the front of it around to his back so its silvery decal of a kittenhead now yowled upwards into the wide creeping sunbeam.
“You probably shouldn’t give little kids drugs though.”
“Yeah, well, comme ci, comme ça.” Then I picked up my phone and looked at it and set it down again. “I was fourteen at the time and fourteen-year-olds are dumbshits.”
Beyond the split-rail fence above Onion Creek, the dark bracken crackled and shook. The parakeets were gone. So were the finches. Daniel likewise grunted and shifted in his spot. His head and the complete top portion of his mouth poised upwards and his thin pink tongue dangled puckishly into the ivy that made up most of her yard.
She put out her cigarette and leaned her head lazily against her shoulder and studied me for a moment. Her thick black hair fell across her eyes and her face and there were tiny little leaves in her hair. “Hey I know this is kind of left field and all,” she said after a bit. I reached over and picked one out. “But what’s your middle name again? I don’t think you ever told me before.”
“It’s Joseph. After my mom’s dad.”
“Brent Joseph Johnson,” she magged. Then she took my empty beer can off the blanket and tossed it onto the pile near our feet.
“What about you?”
“Amber. Lynn.”
“Penny Amber Lynn Davis.”
“And Brent Joseph Johnson.”
The new can she gave me smelled like pond water and gasoline and when I wiped it off with the hem of my shirt, eyeletted from my beltbuckle or from sneaky moths or something, the smell of it seemed to amplify somehow if smells can even do that.
“It’s weird,” she said, “how we always hide our middle names from each other, you know?”
“Pretty much.”
“It’s like nobody ever introduces themselves as Brent Joseph Johnson or Penny Amber Lynn Davis.”
“I know, right?” Then I reached past her thighs to the cooler and grabbed a small piece of catfish from Daniel’s side of the ice and flipped it to him. I overshot his weird head by about four feet. “Hearing somebody’s middle name for the first time is like looking at their open labia. They just seem so exposed.”
“Exactly,” Penny laughed.
Daniel turned away from us and bellied over to the fish where he ran his snout along the top and sought it with the slobbery folds of his odd fucked-up mouth.
“So where would you go if you did have the money?”
“Someplace far,” she said. “Someplace quieter.”
“Like Arizona?”
“No, too touristy there.”
“What about Peru?”
“No no, someplace closer.”
“In Kansas they got these old salt mines you can visit, hundreds of feet below the earth. Hollywood stores old reels of film down there so they won’t decay.”
“That’d be all right.” She stretched out her legs and yawned, “Do they have places to sleep?”
“Not really,” I said. My stomach started to grumble again so I pressed the heel of my beer against it. “But those mines are big enough that we can just bring our own gear and hide from security.”
A mosquito landed on her shoulder and I watched it turn and hop across her skin. “And I can pack us some food too,” she added, “and we can build a little pup tent with all that gold lamé we stole from the VFW.”
“I think it was the Legion.”
“Right. Exactly. And our sleeping bags can be gold too. And everything can be gold and perfect.”
“Gold and perfect,” I echoed. “Gold and perfect for Miss Penny Amber Lynn Davis.”
“Right,” she said, “gold and perfect for Mister Brent Joseph Johnson. And Daniel too. And any other pets we adopt.”
“Hallefuckinglujah,” I said, finally cracking my beer. Foam spritzed across my hands and my lap. “And we can bring a whole entire menagerie. And everyone can wear top hats and monocles and smoke from ivory cigarette holders.”
“And we can name them after dead aristocrats. From countries that don’t exist anymore.”
“It’s a date,” I said.
“It’s a date,” said Penny.
Then we lifted our beers and cheersed on it.
*
It was about 4 a.m. the following weekend and I was still barely awake. I’ve always struggled against spells of insomnia, especially around my birthday when the weather turns dry and cool, and this struggle often lasts deep into winter when it finally collapses under the psychic weight of the snow if it even snows at all—or it just ends on some accord that I don’t know what. Penny was in bed, I remember, and I was listening to loud music on my headphones—mostly vinyl rips of old SST and grindcore—and pacing around her house in my own mental twilight: through her sunken living room, along her bookshelves and records and black velvet paintings, throughout her burnt yellow kitchen and its burnt pink furnishings. Then as I made my way back to her trailer I found Daniel, himself still half-awake, with his head lifted out of the fountain, kind of smiling at me like he’d just heard a joke. I can’t remember what was playing at that moment but it was at a quiet point in the song or like maybe it was a song of all quiet, or whispers, or murmurs, or heartbeats, or something. My taste in music being really awesome in my midthirties or really fucking shitty depending on how you look at it. But as I moved towards the same window where I’d seen those lime-green parakeets, I began to hear something else in all that quiet. Like some kind of wheezy high-pitched rabble. Or a faint and violent calliope blown in from the countryside. I pulled the blinds and pressed my forehead against the glass, and as my eyes gradually adjusted to the dark, I could see that spooky creek foaming and surging halfway up her yard. The bamboo was gone, scoured off to the north, her toolshed, the wooden fence, her clothesline, her lawn furniture and birdbaths. Several of the old pecans above the galleried creek had also buckled into the floodwater so that the near perfect dome of her tree canopy had broken open and now the purple overcast bled in through that eastern gap. And as I backed away from her window, I continued to watch the pale monstrous water consume her yard while the creek grew wider and wider.
Then it struck me what I was hearing above the music.
What the meteorologists at the National Weather Service in New Braunfels will tell you, just like they told the news media, is that at the same time that Texas was undergoing a historical drought, sections of Hill Country were also experiencing record rainfall, even flooding another Austin neighborhood about two weeks prior to the one that destroyed Daniel and Penny. But of all the interviews I saw on YouTube, and all the scientific journals I read, and all the databases I accessed, and all the reels of microfilm I cranked through, in the following years, nobody—not a single goddamn person—could clearly explain why this was the case, and when it came up in comment threads for Facebook memorials or at City Council meetings or the bitter FEMA townhalls at Perez, it was almost like any clarity about the phenomenon had swept away in the flood.
When I rousted Penny from her sleep, she immediately threw the blanket off of her legs and dropped to the floor, already perfectly awake, and padded mouselike to the kitchen. It was mostly dark in her house save for the pale blue light from the preamp next to her turntable that somehow illuminated her beige kimono more brightly than her skin, and as she passed out of the house proper into the annexed trailer and seconds later, as she returned in a panic with Daniel flopping wetly in her arms, her skin vanished entirely, and to me, frozen in the beaded archway to her bedroom, it looked as if it were the kimono alone in transit. It’s here where my memory stretches and thins, and sometime later, in the chaos of my own roiling terror, I surfaced once again, this time into her cramped attic-space with my legs lambed beneath me and my skinny arm hacking hysterically at the belly of her roof with a hatchet til the water both rained through the gash I was making and lapped along my feet from the rising flood of the creek; and swinging harder and faster, I finally broke open a space that was large enough for us to climb through. But when I turned back towards the trapdoor, towards where Penny and Daniel should’ve been, they were no longer there, if they were ever there at all, and in certain sleepless nights, in certain feverish dreams, I can see myself splash over to it and gape down onto the churning water with the same kind of look you get when you stun beef cattle right before you slaughter them.
What I read in the official reports was another thing entirely. All the details were there: like how when the floodwaters retreated by midafternoon, the emergency crew finally managed to navigate their ATVs past the ruins of her muddy driveway, past the overturned utility trucks and the broken trees and the wreckage of other people’s lives, to her little gnomish house where they found her in her sunken living room, facedown in about five feet of water.
The rescuers knew how long she’d been dead by the color of her skin.
And later Satish Chundru, D.O., Deputy Chief Medical Examiner at the Travis County Medical Examiner Office, concluded from his autopsy that as evident from the “pulmonary congestion and edema,” “her sphenoid sinus […] yielding 9cc of watery fluid upon aspiration,” and the “small amount of frothy, tan fluid and small amount of foreign particulate matter within the trachea” that “the decedent died as the result of drowning.” But somehow the report despite its radical listing of the weight of her brain (1275 grams) and the weight of her heart (275 grams) and the fullness of her bladder (“30 cc of clear yellow urine”) and the quality of her ovaries (“not atrophied [with] smooth serosal surfaces” and “no nodules or neoplasm”) seemed sadly uneven as if the individual parts of her refused to sum up to a coherent whole.
And as I sleepwalked my way through wellness seminars and group therapy and yoga classes in order to get a better grip on my trauma as responsibly as I was told how, the details of her death grew just as bizarre as the incomplete picture of our courtship. And several months later while attending one of the angry townhall meetings in her neighborhood, I was introduced to Tony Hernandez, the paramedic who along with several police officers at Parks and Lake had come across her semihidden property almost as a fluke. It was later in the afternoon when the waters had almost entirely abated. Her front door was still locked, Tony told me, so they smashed their way through and found Penny facedown in her flooded living room, covered in ivy and mud, but what they left out of their reports for reasons he had trouble describing seemed to issue more from their own ghostly heartache for their own unaffected families who were already gearing up for a night of trick-or-treating. There’s only so much horror a place like this can handle.
They found Daniel with his snout pressed against the back of her neck, and when they stepped into the dim entryway above the pool, he lifted his weird mutilated head and bellowed deeply and sadly at them so that now the rescue team, stunned, could clearly see his missing bottom jaw and that long thin tongue that should’ve otherwise stretched between two rows of forty snaggled teeth but instead wambled pinkly in its place. Then he dropped his snout once again to her neck like he was trying to console her and eat her at the same time, turning them both slowly in the water.
Finally one of the officers pulled out his firearm and shot him.
It was the unreality of the Halloween flood and my love for Penny and her strange little life among the bamboo and the thornscrub that drove me back to Onion Creek several years later to try and track down her property again—or whatever remained of it. The streets were still there and they still had their stop signs and street signs too, but the houses had been demolished by the city and the federal government, and all that was really left to mark where so many people had lived their remarkable and unremarkable lives were a number of their green transformer units rising squarely from the weeds. It was weird to see a neighborhood like that, converted into parkland, as if this part of Austin now found itself in some strange retrograde against the massive construction sites that pockmarked my own ulterior neighborhood, offering brief and thrilling glimpses into a brief and thrilling future.
When I located what I thought was the entrance to her old driveway, nothing more than a trace of a path where bushes and reeds had grown up rankly through the cracks in the macadam, I began to wend my way carefully through the woods, thinking if I could just make it to the other side where her little pink house used to stand, then maybe I could find something there to help break the spell of that horrible unreality, of Penny and the flood, that tainted every aspect of my life like a psychosis or a fever or what. But as I cleared maybe ten yards from the street, the driveway disappeared altogether and the agave and the brier began to grow heavier and heavier around me, and as I pushed my way deeper and deeper past the crowded thicket and strained harder and harder to break past their mossy branches and spiky leaves, as I fought and pushed and thrashed and swore against the creeping-eeping vines and their creeping-eeping shoots, as I lifted myself onto the gathering piles of brushwood and moldering couches and the fragments of thousands of devastated homes, it began to feel like the ground itself was shifting away from me and forcing me above it like a squirrel or a raccoon or else, just like the ground itself couldn’t figure out exactly what to do with me or where I should go, and yet as I continued to fight my way deeper and eeper towards her house and higher and igher up along the debris and the overturned trees and the hideous massy roots of those overturned trees, into this big terrible displacement, the earth and the air no longer acted like the earth and the air at all, and I found myself suspended in a spot that really wasn’t either one, my hair tangled up in the twigs and the thorns, the ballmoss scratching at my bloodied face, and my bloodied arms nearly pinned to my hips, leaving me entangled among all those broken branches like so many horses I’d heard screaming from the flooded woods moments before the waves broke through Penny’s windows.
