The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories (17 page)

Everything worked out more or less the way Bess and I had figured; we ran out of sheets at about street level, but then it was an easy thing to drag the used tampon out the door, little by little, using winches and our own backs and those of the horses. We had to take it apart and divide it among the carts. What an unholy mess the uncaulked carts made going down the street! We all took a break while the dockworkers Bess had lined up wrung out the sheets over the Thames. Then we had the whole thing to do over in the underground parts until the whole building was stinking and pink but drained of blood. We tipped our hats to the cement pourers going in to make a giant stopper out of Mr. Strick’s marble vaults and stepped out into the dawn. There was already a crowd gathered to cheer us home.

I rinsed out my napkin coat—old habits—and then fell into bed and slept until Bess knocked the next evening. I suppose she knows me pretty well, because she wouldn’t let me be, just sat kicking her heels until I got dressed. The pub was given over exclusively to us that night, what had a right to celebrate, for the next day we was cordially invited to shake the hands of the mayor, and the money was as good as in the bank. Everyone was rubbing shoulders and making a good deal of noise. I tried to explain to Bess that I was in a contemplating mood, but Bess pushed me through the crowd and cleared a seat for me. Someone stuck a glass in my hand. Bess had disappeared. One corner of the room was singing one of the carols, and another corner was singing a different one. There was at least two more corners and dozens of songs to go. The woman across the table from me raised her glass to me and said something hearty what I couldn’t make out. I smiled and drank her health. I started feeling better.

A little later Bess’s ugly, earnest face tunneled up to me through the substantial bums—we was none of us tiny anymore—and someone she had in tow was thrust at me. It was the woman had come up the ladder right after me. She had puzzling eyes, tabby-cat color, but with a star of smoke gray ’round the pupil. I recognized them this time. “You’re my tiddler!” says I.

“I’m twenty-four years old,” she said. “You stuck pins in my feet.”

“Oh well,” said I, “you was a bit prim about getting your hands messy.”

“I’m not prim now,” says she, and sits down on my knee, causing me to put down my glass extremely sudden.

“No,” I agreed. Somebody across the table shrieked as the
forward edge of my bitter reached her lap. I am not an ardent person, ordinarily, and my feelings embarrassed me. “Would you like some pot roast?” I said.

“Maybe you could wear your sanitaries one more time,” she said.

“You shock me,” said I.

We went home at once.

That’s my story, and I’m not telling you any more. Good day, sir, and good luck with your book.

The Greeks divided creation into four elements: earth, air, fire, and milk. Of these, milk is the friendliest, the closest to our hearts. Why does milk fall from the sky to fill our cupped hands? Why do the sweet white rivers roll into the sour sea and never run dry? The answer is obvious: the sky loves us.

(from
The Sky Writer’s Phrasebook)

the soft ivory clouds were unexpectedly generous above the crisp horizon line


there was the merest suggestion of nubile curves behind the veil of mist


budding from the exquisite arc of the sky were tiny clouds of that piquant profile so admired by the French


the thin air flared into a firm, high-perched cumulonimbus

Where does milk come from? It comes from all around. We drink milk, and when we breathe, tiny milk particles float out into the air. Dogs and cats, shrews and elephants: all mammals exhale milk vapor. The milk in the air collects in clouds; when the sky loves us enough, it rains. After the clouds have dropped their load, they drift back to the sea to replenish themselves. Then they set out over the land again to look for us.

The sea stretches as far as the eye can see. Here in the north its sour smell is only a pleasant tang in the air. Inside its soft, wrinkled skin, the white wave swells. It mounts, still dry, and stands off the beach like an albino animal. Then the skin splits over the crest of the wave and peels back, and out of it leaps the pristine arc. Like a snake shedding in one passionate shrug, the glossy body falls out of its torn skin onto the beach. Papery shreds of discarded skin blow up over the dunes and snag in the twisted cypress trees; we northerners call these “ghosts.”

The milk of the northern sea tastes stronger than rain milk, and it is harder to digest, but potable. Travel south, however, and the scene changes. A vast plaque of curdled milk covers the sea. This curd stills all but the most energetic swells, and supports not only extravagant pink, green, and black molds but fields of grass and even the occasional shrub or small tree, as well as vagrant populations of mice, geckos, frogs, and mongooses. One may even see the occasional pilgrimage of the smaller herd animals risking a sea voyage in search of new pastures. Clouds can replenish themselves here only in those vast permanent holes in the curd where the whales surface to breathe.

For large ships, passage through these parts requires a sharp prow known as a butter knife, which can slice through the curd
and let it peel smoothly off to either side, although the locals employ a sort of sled, drawn by quick-stepping wing-clipped ducks bred for wide, flat feet. Indeed, locals resent the cargo boats and tankers, and have successfully introduced legislation to confine them to standard routes, so that the mess of curdled-milk floes and butterbergs they leave in their wake do not make the fishing grounds impassable for local traffic.

Fishermen carve holes in the curd and drop their lines in the milk below. They don’t seem to mind the stench of sour milk, which would fell a landlubber. It is an easy living: life teems in the dark, secret milk under the rubbery mantle. But a white sea under a white sky is a dazzling sight, and many fishermen suffer from milk blindness. Fishermen sometimes weep over their catch, amazed by the colors slithering into a monochrome world. This is a common thing and not looked down upon.

(from
The Sky Writer’s Phrasebook)

quartz, moonstone, ivory, cream, alabaster, opal, magnolia, vanilla, chalk, oyster, lily, eggshell, ecru

The lucky fisherman who has his eyesight can sometimes watch the rebirth of a cloud.

A cloud that has dropped its milk is a very airy being, practically invisible and by most measures, no longer alive. The dry cloud skin blows around helplessly. Sometimes you will find one snagged in a hedge or wrapped around a television antenna, but these soon disintegrate. The lucky ones are blown
out to sea up north or, in the south, into a whale’s breathing hole or a ship’s tumbled wake. If our watchful mariner is close enough he may see the frail husk sink onto the bosom of a wave. Miraculously, it trembles erect. The translucent skin fills with milk. The shape is tugged this way and that as it fills. It staggers, then grows plump and firm. Within minutes, the wraith has leapt rebodied into the sky.

If the sky expresses its love in milk, then clouds are its organs of expression. Tender impulses form minute thickenings in the tissue of the sky. These lumps grow, incubated by the heat of the sun and kneaded by wind currents. When a critical mass is reached the cloud growth stops. There is a pause. Now something amazing happens. Inside the cloud, tiny lobes and lobules begin to form, grow, and divide. They multiply at an astonishing rate. No further matter is required; the most enormous clouds you have seen are spun, like cotton candy, from a gluey lump no bigger than a baby’s clenched fist.

A cloud is a milk-secreting organ. This formless glandular swelling is covered on the lower part or belly of the cloud with minute pores where the milk ducts open. The cloud is not an intelligent life-form, but it does have a primitive muscle system that responds involuntarily to stimulation by stiffening and, if it is engorged, dropping its milk. Clouds are almost entirely made up of milk; that is why they are white. (We, too, are more than 90 percent milk. Though that small proportion of solid matter is enough to make us opaque and colorful, it is well to remember that we are literally intelligent clouds; we have relatives in the sky.) Some clouds have a darker pigment on their rain-bearing underbelly or aureole. This darkening indicates the milk is ready to drop.

The cloud is made up of a fine, branching network of delicate
conduits and reservoirs, loosely gathered inside a porous skin. During lactation or “raining,” the cells contract rhythmically and squeeze the milk down the ducts to minute pores in the skin, where raindrops form. The cloud wrings itself dry, and as it does so its pigmentation fades, the white drains from its body, until the cloud is transparent and nearly invisible.

Need I mention that fogs are not clouds? Still, many people mix them up. Without wishing to enter the fray, I must register my firm opinion that fogs, which have neither skins nor ducts, are no more than listless bands of milk droplets that have not yet found their place in a cloud. These shapeless congeries are entirely different from those low-flying clouds with which they are often conflated due to that fallacious but oft-repeated rule of thumb,
clouds up, fog down.
Why is it so difficult to accept that while some clouds, true, prefer the upper atmosphere, other, homelier clouds are moved to shuffle along the ground? Are we humans (or “walking clouds,” as I like to call us) so different?

Sick clouds will often go to earth. If you find a cloud quivering in a field and it does not take flight when you approach it, palpate it gently to see if it is still cool to the touch, and whether it springs back when poked. A cystic cloud will feel hot, dry, and hard. The immediate danger is that the cloud will pop. If the sickness has progressed this far, there is only one recourse: a sterilized poker must be thrust through the cloud. A cloud thus forcibly deprived of its milk will be traumatized, but it is the only way to save it.

If the cloud is hot but still soft, cover it with a warm, damp towel to keep it moist and help open its clogged pores. Now you must gently rock it onto its side, so that you can sponge its aureole in a gentle rotating motion. Croon to the cloud. Small
peeping cries seem to help the cloud relax. Don’t be alarmed if its milk begins to gush, but draw off the towel and let the cloud rise. You have probably saved its life.

There are also hysterical clouds that show every sign of releasing milk, but remain dry; these malfunctioning clouds are suffering a kind of insanity, if it is proper to speak of insanity with regard to beings that show no signs of what we recognize as cognition. Nonetheless, we cannot help but anthropomorphize these clouds, which seem all the more like us in their confusion. We sympathize involuntarily with their “pride” and their “distress.”

Other
seeming
clouds drop a tasteless, cold, unnourishing liquid. Once, this liquid was considered poisonous, but now we know it is chillingly devoid of properties, for good or ill. These are not true clouds at all, but the skins of clouds hijacked by non-milk-based fluids, and compelled to take their fraudulent cargo along the sky road with the other, real clouds. This liquid—this milkless milk, this
abstraction—has
its admirers. I fear them. Addictive? No, this “water” is not addictive. Water rebuffs need as it rebuffs passion, love, simple tenderness. Even politeness is too warm for it.

Water is modern, oh yes, cruelly so. It is the fuel of a streamlined future. Weaned from milk, we will step forth as autocrats of the nursery, pooh-poohing our teddy bears. This love that makes us tremble with gratitude, our betrothal to the ardent sky, will give way to a pallid aestheticism, the motivator of weekend watercolorists and the peddlers of picture windows to country homemakers. As children we lay on the grass and opened our mouths to be fed; we knew the sky would not overlook us, and it did not. In the watery new world, we will seek shelter from the rain—characterless drops that fall without reason
from a sky without feeling. If that day ever comes, let the traduced clouds drop their cargo, let it never stop. Forty days and forty nights may it rain, until there is water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink. I will drown thirsty, with the taste of milk on my tongue.

(from
The Sky Writer’s Phrasebook)

the sky was dark and insolent and, despite 100 percent visibility, untouchable


our gaze dropped from the smoldering blue—to the mounded, immaculate tops of the clouds—to their swollen underbellies


behind a modest cloud ceiling, the sky was all thermal churning and moist gradients


we sensed the sensuality throbbing behind the crisp lace of the stratus layer


there was a maddening hint of arrogance about the cirrus clouds so carelessly displayed above the rich skirting of fog

It is possible to compute how much the sky loves us. This may be expressed in a number of forms, namely: (1) the milk pressure
m,
which is that part of total atmospheric pressure
p
that is exerted by milk; (2) the relative humidity
m/ma,
which is the percentage ratio of the existing milk pressure to the maximum possible (saturation) milk pressure
a
as determined by the degree of tenderness felt by the sky (it is to be noted that saturation milk pressure is a function of love alone, lowering
exponentially with the degree of passion, that is, the more love the sky feels for us, the less milk it will hold back); (3) the dew point, which is the intensity of romantic feeling to which the air must be raised, under the existing milk pressure, to reach lactation.