fiction by s.r. ponaka

Helen

Helen, the iguana, lives in a corner of the apartment I share with Jackie, right behind the dining room table stacked with junk and next to a green velvet chair that has probably been eaten through by some sort of rodent, its holes spewing synthetic stuffing.  Jackie bought Helen on a hot, West LA Sunday, mainly because she was bored and had wandered into an air-conditioned pet store, although I always thought that Jackie’s experience of boredom was more likely a structural thing—Jackie overcharges for the shit websites she makes, and doesn’t know what to do with her disposable income. But Jackie insists that she felt a connection to Helen right away, because apart from being a programmer, she also wears Victorian corsets and lace skirts over studded cowboy boots, and sings in a band called Absinthe, and thinks of things like the cosmos and the alignment of the planets. She proclaims that Helen is her spirit animal, and so she has kept her locked up for years.

Helen spends the majority of her life in a cage that is 10 feet in height, 6 feet in length, not wider than my arm from fingertip to elbow, and because it is made from a converted china cabinet, it is elevated on baroque carved legs, the glass in the doors replaced by open-air sheets of narrow wire mesh, with holes so tiny Helen can’t even fit a claw through.  Diagonally, from the top left corner to the bottom right one, is an enormous, branch-shaped plastic cylinder, its surface molded to look like bark, one of those pathetic little things that middle-class city dwellers find acceptable as a shorthand for larger things, like trees, or seaweed, or the soil, whole ecosystems of life. Jackie sets Helen’s food out on the newspapers spread out at the bottom of the cabinet, and since Helen shits in the same place she eats, the headlines are forever changing—every major world leader in recent months has received a serving of Helen’s splatter.  Helen is large for the space she lives in, at least 4 feet from head to tail, and she clings to the upper branches of the tree, day and night, because other than eating her thin strips of cabbage and carrots, she can’t so much as make a circle in her cage. As regal and upright as she stands, it’s unclear whether Helen herself feels as if she is a spirit animal, because she seems forever listless and forlorn, and generally miserable. Every time I look at her, I feel ashamed.

There is a cat too. He walks back-and-forth across the dining room table in front of the cage and sometimes bats at the doors when he is bored, which scares Helen. She has nowhere to escape to.  The cat has a tendency to flaunt his freedom. 

I stay in the living room opposite Helen, the second living room in Jackie’s very large home.  The rent is cheap, but that’s because I live on Jackie’s TV room futon, and I fold my clothes into the shelves that are stacked with Jackie’s Green Day CD’s and framed Edward Gorey prints.  I always get lost trying to find the place, because her house is in a northern enclave above the 10, close to Century City, and it’s not built on a grid like the neighborhoods below the freeway, so sometimes it feels like the wealthy people who live up here want everyone else to not be able to find them, with all of the dead-ends, purposeless curlicued roads, and streets that are suspended in parts, reappearing several hundred feet later, on another block. I have to park my car down the street, because Jackie won’t let me use her extra space, in case her boyfriend who never shows up comes over. I rent the place during the week when I'm going to classes, but when Jackie is traveling, I’m allowed to stay free on Saturday and Sunday in exchange for taking care of Helen.  It’s nice and quiet then, because the rest of the time her friends and family are around, and they’re always having boring candlelit dinner parties, and you can tell they’re not used to having a brown girl within earshot, they act all stilted and wooden, and have a lot of whispered asides. The general set-up makes me feel like a failure in life, me babysitting an iguana, and being both present and uninvited to people’s dinner parties, but at other times, I try to convince myself that my journey is just foggy right now, and that the fog always lifts, or eventually gets burned through by the necrotic heat of the sun. 

Helen and I have become close in a way, I think we’ve actually learned each other’s rhythms, or something.  I take care of her even when I don’t need to, especially on the afternoons I come home early from classes, when Jackie has band practice until late, because Helen is usually stewing in her own excrement, sometimes for days at a time.  It’s hard when I’m trying to write a paper that’s due or study for a test, and Helen shits all over the newspapers until they are soaked through in watery feces. That’s when I feel I’m being taken advantage of, because I’m not getting paid for this, and I have to take her upstairs to clean off, my eyes streaming stress tears, because who wants to wash an iguana’s ass when they’re worried about failing a paper on radicalized trauma disorders, a mental health problem their white professor has told them just does not exist. But most of the time, Helen has subtle ways of getting my attention. She starts pacing up and down the branch, then wobbles enough to rattle the whole cage. That’s how I know she wants to be out. 

Tonight, Jackie will definitely be screeching with her bandmates at rehearsal, so I take Helen out of her cage for a wash. I recently figured out a way to carry her without getting poked, which is to wrap my hands around her stomach, and hold her out in front of me.  Her skin isn’t rough like all those lotion commercials I saw as a kid, where a woman is half-naked and wrapped in a towel, and a lizard of some kind passes by her and out of the frame, as she bends her  back in laughter, although back then I never thought I would ever be living with an iguana and know how smooth an iguana’s skin could be.  She is wiggling her tail in delight, because she knows I’m going to put her in a warm bath, and I found Jackie’s expensive lavender oils in the box of makeup under her bed, so I sprinkle that into the water too.  The water in the bath isn't very high because I don’t want to drown Helen. Her tail swishes from left to right, except it’s the opposite of a windshield wiper, because she’s actually smearing the shit from her body across the bottom of the tub, which I have to make sure to clean off before Jackie gets home. I light a candle and some incense, dim the lights, and invisibly tip my hat at Helen as I bid her adieu for a few minutes. 

The cat tries to creep into the bathroom to see what’s going on, and Helen suddenly stiffens her tail in tension.

Helen and I both look at each other.  Fuck the cat, we think, and I banish him. Cats always land on their feet when you toss them out of a room, which is unfortunate. 

I walk down the hallway as Helen splashes away and I go into Jackie’s room.  I find her journal on her nightstand and start to read, but after a few pages I find it so dementedly boring that I toss it on the floor, because how can a woman be so dull that she wonders whether having too much doggy style sex means that her boyfriend doesn’t want to face her, finds her repulsive, or something. Although with Jackie, it might be the truth. I rifle through her drawers to judge her underwear, and see that she has a whole ball of them tucked into a corner, stained at the crotch, with the elastic barely hanging on. I pull them out and laugh at them for a second, then drop them on the floor.  I look at the perfumes and candles on her dresser, they are literally all types of vanilla—Madagascar, Mexican, Indonesian - and I think that I’m just dying of boredom.  I open her jewelry box, lift up a compartment, and there’s a Swisher joint tucked underneath a pearl necklace. I fire it up right there and toke a few times, then put the joint out on her carpet and toss it behind her bureau.

I go back to the bathroom and turn on the light, and Helen looks like she’s ready to get out.  I forgot that Jackie’s specified Iguana Towel is downstairs, but since it’s a sunny day, I scoop Helen up, let her drip all over the bathroom floors, down the stairs, and through the kitchen, and set her up in the backyard, on a rock that has the sun hitting it.  I lay out on my back right next to her, and suddenly I feel something staring at me. I look over and it’s actually just Helen, so I turn over to face her, and I think that she crawls just a millimeter closer to me, and we stare at each other eye-to-eye for a second, and the sun is hitting Helen’s eyes in a way that turns them golden, the light bursts through them, and I think that Helen and I are really seeing each other. It’s hard to explain. Helen’s eyes get heavy-lidded, and the heat starts to make me feel warmer and relaxed, and we both fall asleep on our bellies.

The screen door skreeks open, and Jackie wakes me up because she’s saying, What are you doing out here?

She tells me that she came home early because Absinthe was trying a new version of their cover of Superstition,  but the harp player and the xylophonist just couldn’t get the melody to line up with their moody drummer, and he stormed out, saying their band was bullshit. I’m pretending to be interested, but I can do that easier when I’m not high, because after I smoke, I really don’t feel the pressure to make sense of people’s small lives. The doorbell rings and Jackie gets up to go to the door. I’m trying to get up off the floor but I keep losing my balance. I hear Jackie shriek. And that’s when I realize that Helen is gone. 

At the door is a man holding Helen, although he’s holding her by the tail, dangling her over the front door mat. Helen looks at me as she’s waving her arms around, treading the air.

He says to Jackie, are you missing an iguana? and laughs. I found it a block away, just laying on the grass.

Jackie screams at me, how did she get out? 

I admit that I had given Helen a bath and taken her out to the backyard to get some fresh air, and Jackie is 3 inches from my face when she says, I told you to never take her back there, don’t you remember I fucking showed you where the gaps in the fence are? her spittle landing on my eyelashes. 

The man looks at me and winks, although Jackie doesn’t see it because she’s cooing at Helen, but Helen doesn’t really seem to be that into Jackie at all. 

Then he says, Hey, I was gonna turn this thing into soup tonight, but I thought I’d knock on all the neighbor's houses to make sure.

Jackie screams in horror, and slams the door shut in his face.

He was just joking, I say, but Jackie ignores me and stomps off, holding Helen under her armpit, but backwards, because she’s angry at Helen too. Helen’s legs and tail are unfurled in front of Jackie, and she is looking at me, her face nodding up and down with the rhythm of Jackie’s gait. I feel like she’s smiling at me, and something in my head keeps repeating,

You should’ve run for it kid.

Jackie opens the door and puts Helen on the floor of the cage which is still full of the muck, then goes upstairs to her room. I’m sitting on the futon while I watch Helen climb up the plastic trunk, lay down on the topmost branch, turn to face the back wall, and stare into the corner of her cage.

S.R. Ponaka is a psychiatric social worker, therapist and writer from the Los Angeles area. Her work has appeared in Bright Flash Literary Review, Heavy Feather Review, and Refinery 29. She was a finalist for the 2021 CRAFT Creative Nonfiction Award, and a semifinalist for the 2022 Allegra Johnson Prize. She is a Voices of Our Nations alumna and has participated in the Napa Valley Writers' Conference.