The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories (18 page)

The old superstition that people born in a milkstorm have special powers to bring down milk has almost attained respectability. Some mayors of milk-belt cities have even hired old-fashioned milk doctors to massage the clouds and sing down the milk. The barbaric custom of firing missiles through clouds, on the other hand, has been almost eradicated by fierce public opinion. Even countries whose skies do not love them very much have by and large been persuaded not to ambush with bullets or arrows the few clouds that visit them, and to adopt gentler ways. Famous milk doctors have made well-publicized trips to these loveless parts to sing milk songs and call the clouds. Results have not been spectacular, but it takes time to woo such austere skies as these.

(From
The Sky Writer’s Phrasebook)

the west held our ardent gaze with dark defiance, but a rising excitement stained the east with a rush of pink


the rosy peaks stiffened


the very air seemed electrified


The Coriolis force had the sky in its grip


the clouds tingled/prickled/burned against the silky wind belt


turbulent diffusion spread warmth through the entire body of the sky, until it could not suppress a clap of thunder

In the books it seems simple. “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight.” One thing leads to another, a “delicious shudder” goes through the “welkin,” and pretty soon you’re swimming in milk. We are thrilled by the sky on the page. But the sky overhead makes us a little uncomfortable, with its stillness and its expectancy. We write
the sky is beautiful here
on the backs of postcards that prove it, but when we walk to the mailbox, we keep our eyes on the ground. We buy blow-up plastic clouds and stay indoors.

Once we all knew how to make love to the sky. Watch a baby kneading, sucking, mouthing. In our earliest instincts, we can trace the lineaments of the ancient art. But these are uncertain times, and we no longer trust ourselves. I shall venture, then, to provide some guidance.

First, the sky loves us. It will shower us with milk whatever we do, as a baby is cuddled even when it cries, and does not need to flirt or doll itself up to get its chin chucked. We are afraid of looking foolish, or needy. We are afraid of doing something wrong. Let us abandon these fears.

There is vast room for variation in the love act. True, it is just this latitude that terrifies beginners. “If whips are required, bring me a whip”—they say—”of the proper gauge, and teach me how to use it; if it is the overhead serve, fine, or a flamenco step, I will undertake to learn it, but don’t send me into the backyard with nothing in my hands, and the voluptuous sky spread above me!” Whips may be used, certainly, and racquets, and staccato foot-stamping. So may wind socks, ribbons, balloons; so may textual analysis and fly-tying. In brief, there’s no
end to the techniques that will please the sky, if undertaken with feeling, so let us start with the basics, and leave the rest to individual taste.

Go outside. You don’t know how to make the sky notice you? Don’t worry. The sky already touches you. Your least movement is a caress.

Crook your finger. Feel a slight resistance? Try it again. A coy reluctance, shading almost at once into a gay giving way? Reach forward boldly and squeeze the sky. You will have to get used to the texture of it; the sky is so soft, it accepts everything you do. We’re not used to that much freedom. Open your mouth and let the sky slip in, then press it back out. Now blow gently. Feel a breeze? Run your fingers through it. Press your thumbs into the sky, then insert your fingers, one at a time, slowly stretching the space you have made. Don’t be afraid of hurting the sky. Pull steadily up and back. Molecular viscosity will increase. Tell the sky how pretty it is. Wiggle your fingers slightly. Let the sky bear down on you, but press back.

When you see the clouds gathering, almost anything you do will give pleasure. Now you don’t need to worry about being too rough. The aforementioned whips and racquets may be brought out. Find the sky’s sweet spot and you can thrash away with all your might. Now is the time to let the traditional milk songs come rolling boldly forth. If you’re no singer, never mind! Wordless cries are just as bewitching to the sky.

It is almost dew point. Forget technique. The sky loves you. The clouds are massed above you. Do you want milk? Just cup your hands, and tell the sky
I love you.

(from
The Sky Writer’s Phrasebook)

the sky surrendered utterly, and knew the flooding of uncontrollable pleasure


the sweet agony wrung a moist effluvium from the sky’s throbbing center


we shut our eyes as the warm drops drenched our upturned faces

I’m afraid things have gone to pot around here since you left. Cadbury has buried the remote control and I’ve let myself go. I know you think I should keep my nose clean and return to my studies; that’s all very well, but I have less and less room to move. I could barely get out of bed this morning for the weight on the coverlet, though mind you there’s no particular need to go to bed to go to sleep, now everything’s so squishy.

Have I embarrassed you? Face it, Boney, fat falls. In the neatest homes. In palaces and hovels! But we don’t talk about it. Only a few greasy, fly-by-night presses put out the occasional pamphlet saying what we already know, just to
épater les
uptight. That means you, Jack. But once we read them to each other like pornography.

“Let a house be scraped down to the last layer of paint the night before, it will be buttered by morning; leave it for a week and fat will round every contour. Vacation homes fill with fat; fat bursts the boards from old barns, leaving a barn-shaped block of suet to stand until the warm weather. Fat comes of its own accord, clogging chimneys and closets, stealthily amassing
behind the drapes. Isn’t it time we admitted we all have it? Let me go one step further: that we need it? It’s our food!”

You loved that bit. “It’s our food!” you crooned, stuffing a gooey finger in my mouth. You were holding the page open with your elbow. “ ‘We live on it’—now swallow, there’s a good girl—‘but we don’t discuss it; a vast mutual deception that people of other cultures find hard to understand. Babies love fat and are forgiven for it, but toddlers are sent to their rooms to eat, while adults lick the undersides of chairs, or floss the balustrades, in strictest privacy, and shudder to see foreigners run a finger between the sofa cushions to find a snack. Their houses wobble and shine. Ours are dry, every mitered joint painstakingly scraped clean.’ ” But not mine. Not anymore, Jack.

You were the one who wanted a traditional wedding. I still have the article you handed me by way of asking. “Like Carnival, the cataclysm of marriage occasions a temporary inversion of values; the private is publicized, the unspoken spoken, the degraded is raised up. The bride and groom are left alone to fast. They allow fat to form on their naked bodies; this is augmented on the eve of the wedding by the bridesmaids and best man, who dab on pats of it until the couple is encased in towering masses, hers a sphere, his a cone. These wobbling, glistening behemoths are rolled on trolleys down the wide aisle. (Many urban churches no longer possess the high ceilings this ceremony requires.) In the center of each mass hangs the naked body like a larva.” While I read, you blushed and fiddled with the ring.

“Members of the audience fling themselves upon the couple as they pass, vying for scoops of the fat, which is deemed lucky. In olden days this was a time for feasting; now the blobs are collected
by church functionaries with trash bags, or left on newspapers placed under each chair. By the time the bride and groom reach the altar, they are much reduced (these were days of large weddings) and their faces bared. Our modern kiss was once the first bite of spousal fat. Bride and groom are swept off to a private chamber, where they lick each other clean, a process that may take hours. Engorged, they mate, then sleep. This ceremony, so seldom performed these days, is even more binding now, for having shared this distressing transaction, husband and wife may be bound for life by mutual embarrassment.”

And you, Boney, with whom I shared those sacred rites, you pretend to find me unclean—you who took me for better or for worse, for saturated or unsaturated, who reveled in the ineffable textures of my lard, and whispered foul words to me:
buttery, oleaginous, pinguid, adipose.
Whatever you are doing now, you are a phony, Mr. Sprat.

I am writing to tell you I’m still eating. I have seen the sun rise at fatfall and felt the hot blobs pepper my thighs. My dog swims in the center of the living room, his poop hangs above my sofa; I am letting my house fill up. I will wear a poultice on my forehead, and seal my eyes with buttons of fat. Surely these gestures deserve some response. I spread the fat on the lawn and stroke it onto the lilies. Tulip cups are plugged with it. Roses are beautiful blurs in the banks. Astonished bugs and mice and cats get stuck in the suet. It will not harm them.

While you keep dry in your house of shell and aluminum, in that fat-free land behind the sun, click beetles will telegraph my feats to you, and your toe bones will rattle as you wonder at me. Yes, my fat hat is as tall as your saguaros! Yes, my gown is oleomargarine and hydrogenated. One of these days I will set a
match to all this, and then, dear Bones, though my flame may not outshine your sun, my smoke will put it out. I am painting trees with domestic Crisco, dear. I am covering the car, and see, what fun, I am rolling fat balls, big, bigger, biggest. What for? Meet Fatty the Fatman!

I can’t help it, I was so lonely. He is not much like you—so rounded, so comfortable, so very relaxed. I could sink into him. In fact, I have—I tried to sit on his lap yesterday. I found myself inside him! He didn’t mind, Boney, so you needn’t shake your rattletrap head.

I have snipped your signature off your last letter—it was months ago, Jack—and poked it into his head with a pencil. The hole closed up on its own.

I’ve brought him inside. We watch TV. The set is buried, but we can see the moving shapes, and the blue light. In our bliss, it’s all we need.

I am selling ties made of fat. Ties, and aprons, and mittens. I stamp them with the image of the Fatman. They’re doing very well!

No, of course they are not doing well. Nothing is doing well. I suppose I sleep well, except I set the alarm six months ago, and it goes off twice a day, somewhere deep in the fat. I can’t reach it to turn it off, I can’t find it, I can’t bother to find it. The fat is piling above my chimney. It piles, and piles, like an upward icicle, a stalagmite, and then it topples. And then once again it piles and piles. The roof is covered with fallen piles, the mound rises higher and higher. Birds pass over the house and are seized in mid-flight. They stick there, batting their wings if they still can, until they fall into lassitude and despair. Eventually they will probably die, though surrounded by food. My dog
is not so stupid; he eats his way away from his shit, and bores a shitty tunnel toward the door. Boney-o’s gone hunting, his knees a-clacking, his ribs going rat-a-tat-tat, and an oboe for a nose. Long white bones and the rest all gone.

The pit slipped out of the apricot and went for a walk. Good riddance!

You always warned me to scrape behind my ears and spoon between my toes, to squeegee my back and the closet doors, to wipe behind the organ and irrigate the jambs. Now I mortify myself. Frosted all over with fat, like a despairing cake, I circumnavigate the yard at a crawl. The house is the center of my orbit. Here I go, ’round and ’round, crawling, and I don’t really know why, except that someone has probably set me at it, hence this feeling of obligation and even, yes, an obscure satisfaction, not pleasure of course, but a dog’s satisfaction at obeying orders. Whose? Must be yours, Boney-o. Oh, I can see you now, adjusting your cuffs, crossing your narrow ankles, not looking at me as you remind me of your hopes for me, which I will never live up to. “Up to which I will never live,” you bark. You have a cane hooked over your elbow. What a fop you are, Mr. Clean. And what a caricature. Yes, maybe I’m getting muddled, mixing you up with a character in a storybook.

In any case I’m growing uneasy with the idea that you ordered me to crawl around the house like this, “frosted all over with fat, like a despairing cake.” As if you could come up with something like that! No, I’m probably doing it to spite you. I’m wearing my dressing gown, the one you hate, with the roses. All my other clothes are lost. Why do you hate this dressing gown? I know, it’s the roses, big as cabbages, shameless as a beaver shot. They cheer me up.

The little birds squeak from their weird perch. Maybe after all they’ll be OK, the sun will melt the fat on their wings and they’ll go flapping off to their babies. No, I can hear you saying, some things just aren’t meant to work out, pull yourself together.

I know what you want, Boney-o, don’t think I don’t see it. When I’m as thin as you wish I were I’ll be a skeleton.

When I get tired of crawling, I go into the house, and when I get tired of the house, I crawl. Since nobody has commanded me to crawl, I can set my own hours and even take days off if I want to, though usually I like to get some crawling done every day. The point is, it’s up to me; that’s the advantage of being self-employed. I sometimes think I’m setting a new standard for crawling, or as I sometimes call it for the novelty, creeping; then I remember I’m the only one doing it. It doesn’t matter anyway. Whether I crawl with particular intricacy, or with irony, or with girlish artlessness, I’m only pleasing myself, not that I shouldn’t please myself; in fact if I wait for someone to wade into the garden to drop a medal over my neck for freestyle creeping, I’ll wait a long time.

It’s interesting, though, that there are aesthetic satisfactions to be had in, loosely speaking, crap: the rattle of phlegm in the throat, the shine and firmness of some turds, much nicer than the raggedy look of others, and fat, too, that offal, is sometimes, oh, marvelous—a trembling, fragile, cream-colored gateau—while sometimes, I’ll just say (to spare your sensibilities), less marvelous. For example when it has hair and sweepings mixed with it. Or has gone a bit curdy and horn-colored on the exposed parts. But I did not mean to describe it.