The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories (8 page)

Branches fell around me, springing up again to clobber my knees and ankles. The insides of the thicker branches, once I split the sheath of fibrous rhubarb stuff, were pulpy and pink. It fell out in chunks from the cut ends. Only the red corm was left, rearing up in the midst of the wreckage. It was my height. I swung. The axe bit into the body and stuck, a heavy bad feeling. When I pulled it out, gobs of the inside stuff spattered my shoes.

I stood in a still heap of red lengths. There was silence in the room. A pink clot detached itself from the ceiling and dropped at my feet. I looked up at the dot of mucus that marked where it had been. Nearby, other clots trembled, unsticking themselves. They rained slowly down on the body, on the murderer. The clot at my feet was shrinking into a widening disk of clear liquid. There was no epochal shift, no grind of planets swerving in their spheres. I was still guilty, perhaps I had always been guilty, in advance, for this moment. I saw her face at the window, then it went.

Completely normal,
he wrote,
for man years completely normal,
then he took out
man
and put in
many.

Maybe he had just spent too long working the nerves. Nerve fibers once had a reputation as aphrodisiacs, and were fashioned into amulets for daily wear, from simple rings and bracelets to elaborate knitted codpieces. In the town where George grew up locals believed to this day that a walk in the nerve fields made women ovulate and a handful of freshly cut nerve fibers under the pillow brought true dreams of love. A nap in the fields had more lasting consequences: George’s town, like every small town on the Great Plains, had one or two children known as
nervous.
They were said to be the offspring of the plains themselves, and their mothers were blamed for nothing more damning than carelessness. Skeptical outsiders might take note of the many flattened patches in the fields near town, and the well-trodden paths that led to them.

Tender, susceptible fields! A careless boot sent a wave of consternation seven miles. A gunshot made the plains flinch to
their last hummock. But at night, when lovers lay in congress in the fields, the pale strands flexed contentedly against the black sky. Concentric rings spread from their several centers and collided in elaborate interference patterns that made the whole plains hum a particular note. In the village they heard the note. They recognized it, they smiled, they fell back asleep. Or they worked out the harmony on their creaking beds. George used to lie awake, listening.

Completely normal,
wrote George, though he remembered going to his mother and saying, “Mom, am I nervous?”

“No, of course not, what put that idea into your sick little head?” Mom had said, and what George remembered was that he was disappointed. So, a desire to be special, even then.

Completely normal,
wrote George, then selected the phrase and rendered it in bold, as if to spite his own memory.

Cut nerves left lying on threshing floors drift and roll and wind up all aligned with the earth’s magnetic field, like iron filings swayed by a magnet in a classroom experiment. (Bring a smaller magnet into the barn and watch them try to follow it!) But there are places where the magnetic field of the earth is disorganized, the ley lines tangled. Compass needles wag; carrier pigeons lose their way.

It so happened that a big nerve supplier built a warehouse in one of these places, and that George worked there. Big signs were posted all over the building:
CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELVES. ALL NERVES MUST BE BUNDLED
. And simply,
SWEEP
. The workers were meticulous, by and large. All the same, it was bound to happen: a nerve slipped out of a bundle, slithered under a pallet, went unnoticed. In a few days, another one got away. After
a while there were four, five, twenty-five scattered here and there around the warehouse: under tables, in cracks in the floor, snagged on splinters in the door frame.

Slowly, slowly, they were drawn together. Some moved like inchworms, humping up. Some like sidewinders. Some just slithered. They amassed: a pale, luminous pile in what moonlight found its way through the dusty windows.

Nerve fibers have a curious property. They organize themselves. They twine, knot, braid, lace, plait, mesh, splice. Some stringent ancient script takes over.

By midnight, a thick braid lay shining on the ground. (At home, George was sleeping quietly for the last time in his life.) Over the ensuing hours, more strands knotted themselves to it. They formed nosegays, posies, faggots. Sheaves and bales. (George slept on.) They twisted, coiled, fretted themselves together. (George woke up, took a hard-boiled egg out of the fridge, baggied it, shook some salt into the bag, set out early for work.)

A forked figure stood, took a bite of the apple.

George’s key turned in the lock.

These spontaneous assemblages of sensibility are not just admired by aestheticians and teenage girls. One minute you’re a man of business, the next you’re writing sonnets to a squiggle of sore pasta, and your career can go to hell for all you care.

The warehouse supplied nerve fibers to top designers. George handled the overseas clients. He was a burly, well-spoken man, with clean, filed fingernails. Nobody would have pegged him for the sort to ditch the wife and kids (not yet an actual wife and kids, but a prospective wife and kids, real enough that he could almost see their tiny, resentful faces as
they waved goodbye) and go in for pain and sequins. Nobody including him. But there he was, in love with a length of forked lightning.

How long was that going to last? But it changed everything. Afterwards, he found that he remembered his past differently. Isolated incidents suddenly strung themselves together into an argument, a prediction. Innocent objects started to phosphoresce. A child’s
Rainy Day Fun Book
metamorphosed into a grimoire.

“Tie a Turk’s head in a hank of nerves—four fibers will do. Give the nerves a turn to make a neck. Reserve two fibers for the arms. Twist the remaining two together to make the body of your nerve man or lady. When half of their length is still remaining, separate them to form the legs. Give them a little loop at the end so the dolls have feet to stand on. Keep your eye on them while you fashion their outfits—don’t let them get away!

“Here are some easy outfits you can make. Cut a dress out of plain paper. Tape the nerve lady to the back side. You may want to draw a pocket or an apron on the dress. Your nerve gentleman does not need much clothing, but perhaps you will want to give him a natty bow tie! Cut it out of plain paper and give it a gay pattern with your crayons. How about polka dots? Or stripes? Now your nerve gentleman is ready to step out with the lady of the house.

“Maybe you would like to give your nerve man and lady a shoe-box house to live in. Glue a piece of patterned paper on the floor to make a rug. You can cut out miniature pictures for the walls, or draw windows for them to look out of. Chairs can be made out of corks and nails, see page 23. Do they like to
watch TV? Draw a scene from your favorite TV program on the front of a box, and add some dials. Use your imagination!

“When you’re finished playing, just put on the lid to keep them safe and sound until next time.”

“It was cruel,” George told his therapist. “But children are cruel, aren’t they? Not evil, but nonchalant about pain. I was interested in salting slugs, swatting flies. Of course, the general opinion at the time was that the nerve dolls didn’t suffer because they weren’t really alive to begin with. Frog legs kick in the lab with no frog attached to them, you know. Chickens gad about without their heads.

“They weren’t the best-looking dolls. No more than stick figures. Their paper-doll dresses hung crooked, and exposed their backsides whenever they turned around. How I laughed!

“Now I regret the bow ties and aprons. What an impertinence. The poor things were in agony. They were just alive enough to feel pain. A knot of appetite and no insulation. An erect twinge, a stitch on tiptoe.

“They waltzed, after a fashion, holding each other up so as little of them as possible touched the ground. Then they fizzed, smoked, fell over and ‘died.’ ‘Boo hoo!’ I cried, ‘Boo hoo!’ and held little funerals. That was my favorite part.”

Not that pain is the worst thing in the universe. Interesting things happen when you adopt pain for your own. This thing you were prepared to spend your life flinching from is suddenly just another piece of information.

George began to feel that his own comfort was an affront. Sitting on the toilet, he squeezed the rolls of fat around his middle,
cupped his breasts, measuring. Somewhere inside George was another George: spiderlike, avid, flexile. Like grammar, but physical. George wanted to make himself into this other George so that he would be more like his lover and by being like him, possess him again. So he ate less and less and during lunch at the warehouse he picked up some fibers and played cat’s cradle with himself. When he could not help himself but eat, when it was someone’s birthday and everyone sang and there were cupcakes with candles on them, he learned how to make himself vomit up the sweet sludge before it stuck.

Cat’s cradle used to be a game for priests and princes. It retains a whiff of the sacred. You are playing a game with string, then you are in the milieu of the miraculous.

Every once in a while, through luck or incredible skill, a figure is actually perfect. An instant is long enough: the cat’s cradle kindles. Flames run along the fibers. A glyph of fire stands in the air. It goes out a second later; all that’s left is a blue smoke, a weird smell, a fading cicatrix on your retina. Your hands fall away.

“Everything perfect burns itself up,” George told his therapist. “A perfect thing does not have to hang around, it has satisfied all the requirements of existing. That’s what Deja says. Or maybe a perfect thing can’t hang around, because perfection has no place in our world, which is a world of approximates. Existence
is
approximation; we are because of a kind of blurring of the material world. All attempts at perfection are destructive, therefore.”

“Want to talk about this diet you’re on?” said his therapist.

…

French designer Deja, one of George’s best customers, had made the front-page news worldwide when his electric dresses burst into flames on the runway and disappeared in a puff of smoke, leaving two of his models naked and innocent of body hair.

“Well,” shrugged Deja in newsprint, “it simply means I achieved a perfect form. Perfection cannot last.” One model later revealed that she had not had any body hair to begin with. This had not stopped Deja, next spring, from bringing out a triumphant new line of depilatory dresses for ladies, depilatory culottes and tunics
pour l’homme.
“All have sold sensationally in Europe, but American customs officials have refused to allow them in the country. Yes, they are dangerous—so is
l’amour,
which recognizes no boundaries!”

George read the article to his therapist. “As yet, France is the only country where you may attend the opera with your head in flames, but American scene-makers were seen passing a petition at the Paris and Milan shows, so we may see a relaxation of the policy yet.

“Buyers have conveyed to Deja their customers’ requests for depilatory panties that can be worn to work. ‘Our customers love the idea of depilatory clothes, but are afraid to go to the office in a dress that may go poof,’ they say. ‘Many of our customers are successful women in high-paying jobs and must maintain a professional demeanor,’ they insist. ‘Unfortunately, naked says unprofessional to these women.’ So far Deja is resisting the pressure, though underlings have dropped hints that he may soften his stance in time for fall. We spoke to him in his Paris atelier.

“ ‘Beauty must be convulsive or not at all, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘I give the people something to look at, like it or not.’

“There was a flash of light and his pants disappeared. We saw what he meant.”

“Boys don’t do this,” thought George, his soft breasts shrinking, parallel horizontal creases appearing in his stomach, a strange side effect of weight loss, his ribs appearing, knuckles appearing. “This is what girls do”; then he was filled with pity for girls, and admiration for their love of will over appetite.

George was no longer looking very much like himself, hair dry and wispy, bruises on his arms, a broken blood vessel in his right eye from puking too hard, eye flooded with cardinal red, the whites not white, closing in on the pupil, which stayed blue, however. Lapis and ruby. He tried to keep his eyes lowered until this condition passed, so as not to flash his single soiled petal, his damned spot. He was appalled but slightly thrilled by this disfiguring mark. He celebrated by burning off all his pubic hair with one of Deja’s new samples. He was purifying.

A guitar can be strung with nerve fibers. It is difficult to play, since nerves stretch: every note bends. The sound is unearthly, instantly recognizable, and not to everyone’s taste. It enjoyed a brief vogue in psychedelic music, then reestablished itself as a solo instrument, where problems of tuning are less evident. Very few modern pieces have been written for the nerve guitar, since the plaintive traditional melodies are so rich in variations and so difficult to master that most guitarists spend their lives learning to play them, and prize nuanced performance over an original tune. (Chanter Ramos, who in the seventies used to strap on a nerve guitar to head his fifteen-member band of multi-culti artistes, was a figure of fun to these musicians.) On stormy or sexy nights, when the plains hum, you can sometimes
hear a solitary nerve guitarist start up a descant over the drone. There is no more piercing or desolate sound.