The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories (4 page)

Oddly, the ending is much the same as that of
The Bad Egg.

In the center of the egg, immobilized by the clasp of its flesh, I felt incredibly calm.

But how hard I was, how gnarled and dense, like the pit of a peach. The sweet flesh was wet and clung all around me, but I was caught in a furious refusal, despite all my longing. Beauty was all around me (The splendid surplus! A blazing chrysanthemum!) but I stuck to myself like a scab.

It is the nature of a thing to be inert; oh how our alchemists must coax and wheedle the thing to kindle spirit in it, and then whoosh goes the vapor out the chimney, leaving behind a bit of treacle in a jar. We study to be things, impressed by their steadfastness. Why, you can swallow a stone, and find it in the toilet bowl in the morning, unchanged; we dream of such obduracy. But that is not our nature, we are built to slump, trickle, and run; waters sluice through us, and we are curious and fond. Bruised as a child (but no more than most people), I had learned to sit in shit like a stone and smell nothing and betray
nothing. I had supposed that there was some reward—the curtailment of pain, at least. Now I know the reward: to become that stone.

Dear egg, melt me! I have practiced permanence, yes, but only to keep myself for you. I would drop my bones in an instant to leap to your mouth in one soft, elated blob. I could be yolk, albumen, and water; I could be the most delicate syllabub, scented with rose water and cardamom. I am Turkish delight, I am marzipan, taste me, take me!

When I emerged from the egg, disgusted and humiliated, dripping a pink syrup that now seemed filthy to me, I was not congratulated or bumped on the bottom. Nothing had happened. The burn on my wrist had healed and my complexion would stay clear for two weeks afterwards, but I had not gone in for a spa treatment.

There were my clothes, flung about with an abandon I now thought was ridiculous. I sat on the ground and wiped myself with my wadded socks. Then I put my clothes back on. I thought I had never done anything so terrible.

I packed a bag and went to Boulder to visit my friend. She was pleased to see me, slightly less pleased when she realized I had no particular plans to leave. After a while I began to do some of the things I used to do: watch movies, read, write a little. I didn’t call the store or Cass. I kept checking myself, to see if I was changed. Perhaps I had misunderstood, and the egg’s rejection of me was itself a rite of passage I had not recognized, because I had my own idea of what translation should feel like. But there was nothing different about me except for this checking itself—the flinching and squinting and double takes in the mirror.

Maybe disappointment was enlightenment, and this acquaintance with futility was the closest I would come to God.

In cabalistic tradition, the number
one
is not an abstraction, but the proper name of the egg. We do not count
one
—any child knows you don’t need an abacus to see how many one is—we say its name. Egg, two, three. This is not to say that
two
means two eggs. The egg is singular and sufficient. It is not a unit or a building block.

I came back to San Francisco on a windy, blond day: cotton shirts, flags, dog walkers in shorts and mustaches. An old man stooped to pick up a hose as I walked past his yard. He had thinning yellow hair, and the rim of his ear was soft and red. He had a huge boil on the side of his neck by the collar of his turquoise shirt; it was so swollen it was almost spherical, and the wrinkled skin stretched over it until it was as tight and shiny as a child’s.

I passed the playground, where a few kids were working in the sandbox with bright blue plastic buckets and spades. A little girl looked up at me: a little girl with no face. A smooth pink globe seemed to supplant her head. Then the bubble collapsed and she sucked it back into her mouth.

I walked right past my house. I wasn’t quite ready.

In the coffee shop, I noticed the chipmunk cheeks of the girl working there, and her breasts, which strained the vintage print she was wearing, and her upper arms—she had cut off the sleeves of the dress—which swung vigorously as she frotted the steamer wand with a yellow towel. She had the thin white scars
of a decorative cutting on her shoulder—a rough circle. Everyone is made of spheres, and the world is round.

The egg might more properly be seen as the ambiguous zero, which sits at the center of the number line, but is scarcely a number itself. The List of Lists does not include itself, you will not find the Book of Books in its own bibliography, the King of Kings does not kowtow to the crown. When all matter is totted up, one thing remains: the egg itself.

Cass opened the door. “Imogen,” she said.

I went straight through the apartment and out the back. She followed me. “Things are a little different around here, if you’re interested,” she said. But the egg still lay in the tiny backyard, even bigger than before, wedged half under the shed roof, with the clothesline cutting through it like a cheese wire. It seemed the worse for wear, and there was pink oil all over the concrete near it. Three large, nearly bald cats were lapping at the puddle. They scattered over the fences when the door banged, kicking up their bare bottoms like impossibly nimble babies.

A moment later I saw what I thought was a hurt mouse humping along the base of the fence and disappearing down a hole; after a moment I understood that what I had seen was a featherless bird, using its stubby, plucked wings like crutches.

“They come into the kitchen,” said Cass. “They’ve actually scared away the rats. And check this out.” She stepped over to our failed vegetable garden. A pink mound like an exposed turnip broke the surface. She drummed her fingers on it and it contracted. Then a fleshy end as big as a woman’s heel poked
up through the dirt. “The neighbors complained, but it’s perfectly harmless.” She drew it gently out of the ground. “It’s huge,” she said. The worm butted against her wrists like a blind puppy.

Cass was panting shallowly. Her cheeks were red and shiny and distended, her eyelids fat. Her eyebrows had gone pale, or maybe even fallen out. She had drawn in thin, brown, artful brows, but these, not perfectly symmetrical, did not work with her cartoon farmwife cheeks, her cherry lips.

“What’s going on, Cass?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“You look strange. I think you’ve been eating my egg.”

“
Your
egg!”

“I grew it. It grew on me,” I said.

“You walked out on it. And on me. I had no idea where you were. Just because—” She paused. I thought she might not say it, but she did. “Just because it didn’t want you!”

I threw myself on her. The worm writhed violently between us, then escaped. We struggled on the ground in the syrup. The Mexican guys in the apartment across from us came out on their landing, laughing and hooting.
“Putas! Marimachas!”

Late that night I woke up and looked out the window. The fog was purple and mauve, saturated with city light. Across the way a light was on in an empty kitchen. Down in the yard I could see Cass leaning against the egg. She was licking it.

I dreamed Cass grew fat, shiny, red. As she waxed, the egg waned. At last she was almost spherical, a powerful figure, staring like an idol. The egg was the size of a malt ball, and she picked it up and popped it in her mouth. Then she turned toward me and opened her arms. Her sparse hair streamed from
the pink dome of her skull, her eyes rolled, her teeth struck sparks off one another, and her hands were steaks, dripping blood. Now I knew her. She was the egg. I turned to run, but her arms folded around me, and I sank back into her softness, and awoke pinioned by my comforter, on the side of the bed.

Ancient Persian mystics write that the universe is an oyster. Our incessant desires and demands annoy it; we are the itch in the oyster. Around our complaints a body forms. The egg begins as a seed pearl. It grows beautiful. For this treasure, princes would pauper themselves. To harvest the pearl, we would pry the earth from the sky, though the satisfaction of our desires would destroy the universe and us with it. But be warned. The egg is the gift that robs you, for its germ is pure need: gain it and you will lack everything.

After breakfast the next morning I went down and unlocked the gate across the alley between our house and the neighbors’. There was a heap of splintery boards blocking the alley. I carried them back a few at a time and piled them in the yard. On the other side of the fence, the neighbor’s dog went up and down the alley with me, whining softly. When the way was clear I went back to the egg.

I rocked it back and stuck a board under it, and then I squeezed behind it and rocked it forward onto the board, and stuck another under it behind. Then I rocked it back and fit another board onto the first. In this way I raised it little by little. It took me several hours to raise the sagging center a few feet off the ground. That was far enough. I got down on my stomach.
Syrup hung in sticky cords between the bottom of the egg and the pavement. They snapped across my face as I squirmed beneath the egg. Once the egg’s center of gravity was directly above me I gathered my legs under me. The egg gave slightly above me, allowing me to crouch. The boards creaked, but held.

I stretched my arms out to either side.

Somehow, I stood up.

I took a step. I was carrying it.

There was a thump and scrabble behind me and I started. The egg pitched to one side, but I took a quick step and righted it. The red face of a huge cat was staring from the top of the back fence. Then it jumped down into the yard and padded toward me. I turned back toward the alley. Two more cats crouched menacingly in my path, but as I staggered toward them, they slunk to either side, and then turned in after me.

Little by little I made my way down the alley toward the street. The dog kept hurling itself against the fence beside me. Syrup ran down my face and body and drizzled on the sidewalk. My footsteps sounded like kisses.

“Imogen!”

I turned carefully.

Cass was standing at the top of the front steps in her dressing gown. “Wait, Imogen! Please!” She whirled; I saw the pink flash of her heel as she dashed up the apartment stairs.

I continued on my way. The dog finally crashed through the fence and came bounding up. Six cats slunk after him, followed by a corps of creeping birds. I turned left down Eighteenth Street. I crossed Church. Guerrero. Valencia. People made way. Someone dropped a burrito and it burst, black beans rolling across the sidewalk in front of me. We walked across them.
Someone pushing a shopping cart fell in behind me; I could hear the wheels rattling.

When the light changed at Mission I stopped too suddenly. The egg bounced through the traffic and fetched up in the doorway of a doughnut shop. The whores that hung out there gathered around it, touching it, then tasting their fingers. Cass caught up with me and when the light changed we walked across the street together.

The egg was torn. Things were stuck to it: pebbles, bottle caps, lottery stubs, a blue condom, an empty popper, a parking ticket. I brushed it off. The whores helped, dabbing it with napkins from the doughnut shop. The animals milled around our feet.

Cass waited. I saw she had the worm slung around her neck.

I crouched down with my back to the egg while it was trapped in the doorway and tried to stand up, forcing it up the wall. When they saw what I was doing, two guys came forward and lifted it for me. I started off down the street at what was almost a jog, heading south now, out of the city. My strange train bounced, slunk, hobbled after. Some of the whores came too. The shopping-cart man was there. Two kids carrying a huge boom box between them joined us.

Cass fell in behind.

Nobody can remember when the sperm became large enough to see, but we agree on this: once that point was reached, every generation topped the last. They went from guppy to goldfish, and before long they could frighten a schnauzer, and not much later even Great Danes made way for them. And while it looks like at buffalo-heft they’ve stopped growing, it’s possible they’re just gathering their resources for another leap. We are afraid that the sperm will grow as big as rhinoceroses and hunt us down, but we are much more afraid that they will again grow tiny, that we will have to go back to the screens and meshes we remember from our grandmothers’ doors. What if they grow so small filters will not stop them? How will we protect ourselves?

Sperm are ancient creatures, single-minded as coelacanths. They are drawn to the sun, the moon, and dots and disks of all descriptions, including periods, stop signs, and stars. They worship at nail heads, doorknobs and tennis balls. More than one life has been saved by a penny tossed in the air.

…

The sperm cabaret is coming to town, and Virginia and I are going to see them. The trained sperm are squeezed into specially made costumes, and they dance and flop about, she says, very comically! Can you picture a sperm in a little hat held on with suction cups (an ingenious device explained in the program)? And sporting a very large cravat-cum-cummerbund? They even utter some sort of sound, which I cannot imagine would be very musical, but Virginia says that although guttural, the cry of the spermatozoa is weirdly haunting, and the au courant are scrambling to acquire recordings.

It is hard to believe that the great marble fountains of Brussels, which depict young spermatozoa disporting themselves in the spray, were once considered masterpieces. Few any longer take the time to decipher the complex symbolism that informs these mammoth atrocities. One wonders how a pest as common as pigeons could ever have been elevated, even in metaphor, to the status of gods. From time to time citizens’ groups petition for the demolition of the eyesores, but there is always some sentimentalist or self-appointed keeper of tradition who rallies the public around the monuments, which do at least provide the children of Brussels welcome places to play in hot weather.