Human Sister (28 page)

As I returned to our bed, my bare feet quiet on the warm ceramic floor, I became enthralled by the sight of Elio, who had rolled over onto my absence. Above the blanket lay a dusky arm, its oils and sweat lambent under the full moon. His lush ebony hair, a few strands silvered by moonlight, flowed for the first time over my pillowcase and covered from my view much of his face, except for a dark eyebrow over a single slanting eye shut in sleep, a handsome broad nose, and those warm, pillowy lips.

He was so fragrant, earthy, and warm, so real, so unlike my pallid image then appearing in the bedside mirror as an anthropomorphic patch of Russian River fog or a fey white Schrödinger cat, only possibly there, in the pale white light of the moon.

As I slowly descended toward the bed through the still night air, I noticed my moon shadow drawing near to my dreams’ desire, and in his face I saw that special contented radiance it often acquired during sleep. Smiling dreamily, he reached up toward something wispy between my shadow and the moonlight, and, creating me, pulled me down into his embrace, wrapping himself around me, as he had since we were children: his head on my shoulder, his brow against my cheek, his arm across my chest, his leg between my legs.

He mumbled that I should never again leave him, and then, with a familiar jolt, departed back into sleep, where he lay quietly for a while before his arm and leg around me stirred and he wordlessly moaned as he woke inside a dream. I wondered what it would be like to accompany him there, to his dreams, as Michael sometimes accompanied me to mine—and so wondering, I drifted off to sleep.

Later that night, as the moon winked through clouds, their edges glowing brightly in the dark indigo sky, I woke feeling warm and comfortable in Elio’s embrace. His breath moved softly over my breast. His hair exuded its sensual aroma. His heart measured time for our world.

Sara

T
he sky here in Anzen is bright, but no warmth or comfort radiates from it. How huge the terrestrial sky seems to me now, in memory, compared to this tiny, low sky. I wonder what Michael’s children will experience, what thrills, when they leave here—they’ll have to someday, won’t they?—and rise from these dark depths up into the great arching candied-blue dome, where for the first time they will smell, feel, taste the fleshy air.

And what will they think of the birds and animals, of the amorality of nature—which abounds with infanticide and cannibalism, even the killing of mates in some instances—the unremitting slaughter, the slow painful butchering of prey? Here, they will have the garden dome with its center a fragrant orchard of miniature fruit trees and its walls overflowing with roses, lilies, and marigolds; carrots, beans, and tomatoes; cilantro, basil, and parsley. But in this artificial world where all of their food will be supplied by plants and nutriosynthesizers, where they will not so much as ever see a spider eat a bug, how will they, these strange children from alien depths, respond when they first see a hawk swoop down and moments later hear a small animal’s talon-engendered cry, or when they witness, as I once did, a dog chase and devour a rabbit?

I was five years old when Lily, fully grown by then but still vivacious as a puppy, went out with me to play in the vineyard. The air was breezy, clear, and cool as we ran through white clover and wild mustard growing between rows of trellised vines. In the midst of play, I lay down for a moment on the aromatic ground. The fields, trees, and hills displayed the pastel pinks, yellows, and greens of spring, and cirrus clouds swirled into the deep blue sky reminded me of blueberries and cream.

Lily was wild with spring, eager to move on, to swim in what for her must have been an invigorating ocean of feral fumes oozing from the ground. She ran in circles around me, licked my face, leaned back, her front legs set and ready to spring forward, and barked.

“Yes!” I answered, and jumped up and chased her. Our noisy frolicking frightened a rabbit from its hiding. Lily dashed after it.

“No! Lily, come back!” I shouted as I ran. When I caught up, heaving for breath, I wanted to scream and push her away from the rabbit, but I remembered her bringing me a dead bird and Grandpa wiping my tears. “It’s natural for Lily,” he’d said, “part of what she is. The great and joyful and terrible mysteries of the world cannot be denied.”

Lily lay on her stomach, holding the rabbit in her paws, pulling and tearing sinewy flesh with her teeth. I touched her side. She growled as she turned her head toward me. Her tongue dripped reddish saliva, and grayish white fur clung to her nose and the edges of her bloody jaws.

As I lay on my stomach and pressed my face to her warm, panting side, the stink of rabbit innards seeped through her fur, hollowness grew in my chest, and darkness passed over me, as if I’d been grazed by a black feather.

Licking my face, Lily fetched me back to consciousness. A mangled mass of rabbit lay beside me, and I sensed, without yet knowing, how intermingled all living creatures are, how they caress and devour each other, just as the Earth I live on and love waits patiently to ingest me.

Tearful, I headed back home. Lily romped in the mustard along the way.

When we returned to Michael’s area after Elio had finished his first breakfast in his new home, Elio asked whether he could see Michael and me connect through our braincord.

Michael nodded eagerly. “It’s wonderful being brainjoined with Sara,” he said. “The connection allows me to feel her sensations and conscious experiences. When we’re connected, I’m no longer cut off from her feelings, as others are through the multiple translations of the language of her neurons into English, then English into the language of their neurons. Much is lost in such translations. I have a sense of occupying her body, just as you have a sense, I imagine, of occupying your body. And hers is a wonderful body to occupy. Her interpretations of experiences and memories, how she thinks and feels, fill me with awe and joy.”

Elio looked bewildered, so I took one of his hands in mine. “Let me give you an example, okay?”

“Sure,” he said. “An example would be good.”

“Suppose you are unable to smell due to a defect in the olfactory nerves in your nose, but the olfactory interpretation areas of your brain are in perfect condition. Suppose further that you and I walk into Grandma’s kitchen, and my olfactory system senses a pattern consistent with past experiences of chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven.”

“Sara says chocolate chip cookies are your favorites,” Michael added. “I love them, too.”

“In my brain,” I continued, “this neural recognition of a pattern consistent with the aroma of chocolate chip cookies engenders conscious associations with my unique history of experiencing such cookies. These conscious feelings might be translated into English, so that I might think to myself or say to you, ‘Mmm, I smell chocolate chip cookies baking.’

“Two serious communication problems are highlighted by this example. First, the essence of my feeling of sensing and recognizing chocolate chip cookies is lost in translating from my neural language to English. This points out why speech is inherently unsatisfactory: words, being nothing more than components of instructions to guide the reader’s or listener’s imagination toward the targeted feelings, images, or thoughts, expose only themselves; our feelings remain locked inside, never to be felt directly by another. That is the general rule. But because of the braincord, I have become a part of Michael as no one has ever become a part of anyone else before, though our braincord system only pushes back the solipsistic problem by one. Now, it is Michael and I together, as a unit, that is like everyone else: a being that feels but cannot be felt. The drive to overcome this experiential disconnection is undoubtedly the foundation of our desire for love, for literature and other forms of art, and for the infinity that it would take to succeed.

“The second communication problem this example exposes is that under the circumstances we have hypothesized, you would have no way of translating my English utterance about chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven into something experientially meaningful to you, since you would never have had the experience of smelling anything.

“However, if we could directly connect my olfactory nerves to yours at a place beyond the defects in the nerves of your nose, then, after some amazingly new and wonderful experiences for you in which you would learn about the world of smell, we could, so connected, walk into the kitchen when Grandma’s baking chocolate chip cookies, and you would sense the aroma along with me. Then it might be you who would exclaim, ‘How wonderful! My favorite—chocolate chip!’”

I looked at Elio for a response, but he just stared at me blankly. 

“So, what do you think of that?” I asked.

“I think I just arrived yesterday, and because of jetlag my head feels clogged with wool. Most of what you just said sailed right over me.”

First Brother

She takes hold of the doorknob and pushes the door farther open. The dog tries to enter by squeezing in between her left leg and the door. She catches the dog’s collar with her left hand. “No, Rusty. Sit. Good boy. Now, stay. Stay. I’ll be right back.”

She enters through the door and closes it behind her. The dog sits for 12 seconds, gets up, walks to a shrub nearby, sniffs, lifts its right hind leg, and urinates.

The dog looks toward the door. The door opens. She rushes out through the door with her gloved right hand over her mouth. The dog runs in front of her, collides with her right leg, and yelps. She stumbles but catches her balance. She pulls her hand from her mouth, bends over, and regurgitates. She coughs and spits, then steps over the regurgitated material and falls, wailing, facedown onto the variegated grass.

Sara

T
he day after Elio arrived, he noticed our two-person sea kayak hanging in the garage, and the next morning he and I were on the Russian River, a river he quickly grew to love: otters playing; harbor seals basking in the sun; ospreys mounting the air with silver flesh wriggling in their talons; magnificent redwoods and Douglas firs exuding their resinous perfumes; and, protruding from the ocean near river’s end, huge sea stacks, around the craggy edges of which waves splash and swirl, pound and roil, as gulls, like sleek white kites, dive and soar in the salty air.

The first weekend of November, when the vineyards were draped in sunlit autumn colors, we put in upstream a little before noon Saturday and pitched our tent in time for dinner on a secluded private beach that was little more than a tiny patch of sand on the river’s edge. It was my job to prepare the meal, and as I did I enjoyed watching Elio bustle about, setting up what he proudly called our home: tent, sleeping bag, air mattress, thermal unit. As we ate, the air was cool and clear; the river chuckled softly; and though our cups and plates were made of plain white paper, the sky was Wedgwood blue.

After dinner, we sat together on the sand and watched the sun ignite a flocculent canopy of pastels as it settled behind the tops of distant trees, above which a cloud, half-bruised, half-bright, appeared impaled on a pink contrail. Later, we snuggled together in our sleeping bag and gazed out of the open tent flap at a clear night sky. Elio said the stars seemed more numerous and closer than they had appeared to him in Amsterdam, as though somehow we had been elevated into the heavens.

In the morning, light fog muted the previous day’s bright vibrancy, but we found the misty view romantic and several times pulled our kayak up onto the shore to walk the hills and roll around in musty leaves.

We made it to river’s end in time to watch the sun puff itself up and slide, liquefying into the sea, while pastel pink clouds floated in vaporous milky blue.

“But I like pastels,” he objected to my sighing over a dashed wish for a wild vermilion sunset that would stun the ocean, the evening sky, and him. “My favorite picture is full of pastels.”

“What picture is that?”

“Pale blue eyes, white-blonde hair, rice-paper skin flushed from exercise—you know the picture.”

We laughed and hugged, and when I next looked up, the sun was gone.