The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories (3 page)

“What are you?” I asked the face. There was silence, which I had expected. “Who are you? What is your name? I’ll have it out of you in the end, old drippy head, your ghastly looks don’t frighten me.” But the egg said nothing. The summer was passing, the egg was growing, and I was no closer to knowing what to do with it. There seemed to be every chance of failing decisively, while success was a mystery of which none of the books ever spoke, except in the most general terms.

I leaned against the egg, and sank a little way into the pink wall. It was neither sticky nor slippery, just moist, like a healthy cheek on a warm day. I stroked the egg, then began palpating it
rhythmically with my fists. I pressed my face against it until I needed air. I backed up, gasping. The egg was the most provocative thing I had ever seen. I was jealous of the flies that licked its crown, the ants that were already tasting its effluvium.

I sat down on a cinder block in the shade of the egg. My mouth was dry. The egg was full of water; each cell wall was healthily distended around a fat globule. I poked my finger into the egg and the hole slowly filled with clear fluid. I slid the tip of my tongue in the hole and lapped up the water. Then I sank my hand in and tore out a hunk. I chewed and swallowed until I had reduced the piece to a wad of gum, and then I rested, staring up at a seagull, until it disappeared behind the pink curve of the egg as if swallowed by it.

The surface of the egg has been divided up into territories. Some cartographers of the egg—we might also call them phrenologists—name twelve principalities, others swear to twenty or thirty. Claims have been made for as many as ninety-nine.

Each principality is the purlieu of a given quality or affection. One is kindled by song, one by wit; one admires artifice, one multiplies complex fractions for sport. Numerological and astrological schemes are not neglected, and among all these, there is a bailiwick for you—yes, you. If you want the egg to take you in, you will need to knock at the right door.

I got up, intending to hurl myself headlong into the egg. But as always, something stopped me. Instead I took a paring of its flesh, the size and shape of a minnow. I carried it up to the kitchen, turned a burner on high, and jostled the scrap in a
pan. It spat and flung itself about like something cooked alive—which perhaps it was—until I clapped a spatula on it and trapped it there, sizzling; then it was docile. But I burned my wrist on the edge of the pan trying to unstick the morsel, which I finally ripped off its own crisped skin. I folded it in a paper towel and sat in a corner, sniffing it, running it under my nose like a cigar, dropping it, almost on purpose, on my shirt, and peeling it up again from the greasy patch it left. Finally I stuck it in my mouth and chewed it up and ate it. It was linty.

The missing piece grew back. I was unchanged.

The egg has many names: Terrestrial Moon, Lord of the Stones, the Invitation, Belly of the Ostrich, Excrement of the Moon, Animal Stone, God-pudding, Ore of Hermes; more jocularly, the Great Pumpkin, the Cheese Ball, or Humpty of Notre Dumpty; the Vegetable Meat, the Magnet, and the Blarney Stone.

The egg is manifold: called divine, it can be sliced thin and made into very passable sandwiches. The egg is magical and mundane, Baal and baloney. It’s the all-purpose object of desire, the placeholder for every operation. My kingdom for an egg. Person, place, or egg. Egg, therefore I am.

I dreamed about a girl in a room. She was as white as paper and skinny. There was a hollow spike stuck in her side, attached to a rusty hand pump, and she worked the lever vigorously while blood splashed into a bucket. When the bucket was full, she pulled the spike out of her side, unhooked the bucket, and hurried with it to a sluice that fed through a tumbledown place in
the wall. She dumped it in. Then she went back and started over. It seemed impossible that she have any blood left in her body, but more kept coming, thick and red. I was amazed she spent herself so unreservedly.

The day had been hot, multicolored and banging, full of groceries and loud with basketballs. Spilled smoothies turned to fruit leather on the sidewalk. The smells in alleys and stairwells grew unbearable.

The first bugs—winged ants or termites—went largely unnoticed, like most harbingers. One landed on my inventory book while I was writing. I brushed it off. One crawled industrously among my soaps, fell off, and continued its course on the floor. I had seen six or so before I looked outside and realized the air was full of them. On my break I joined a small crowd that was watching them come up out of a crack in the Wells Fargo parking lot. They dragged their wings clumsily through the openings like ladies in fancy dress forgetting the girth of their skirts. They came out of playgrounds, driveways, sidewalks. By dusk a cone of frenetic activity stood under each streetlight.

When I came home, it was dark. The room was cool blue, with a slight burnt smell of the city, of tarry roofs and exhaust. I went to close the window. The light wind of my movement blew frail things like snowflakes along the sill and off it. They fluttered down into the darkness.

I turned on the light. There were insects all over my bed. Some were alive and still pirouetting, dragging their stiff wings. Most were dead.

The egg was covered with them. Wing-thatched, it had turned white and opalescent. Some of the wings beat, others were still, pressed together like hands. The moon rose and the
egg shimmered like a bride in a beautiful dress, and I made up my mind.

I took off my clothes and climbed in.

I say “climbed in.” It was more strenuous than that. I lowered my head and ran at the egg, ramming my crown deep in the pulp. I got stuck there a moment, with my head caught, then slid my hands into the egg beside my ears, stretching the walls of the hole until I broke the vacuum seal. I felt the egg respond to the insult, fattening and stiffening around the cut, and in effect folding me in deeper, though perhaps the intent was to enclose me and keep me from doing any more damage. I pumped my hips and thrust my head and hands deeper, and though there was nothing to hold on to I managed to drive myself in farther, until I felt the egg close over my toes. Then I swam toward the center.

(Two short films will be shown):

(Bolav Koule, 1982, Dir. Hubert Slameňého, Czechoslovakia, 13 min., color, 35mm: live action plus stop-motion animation; subtitled)

The sagging drapes are imperfectly drawn together against the heavy yellow sun, which leans on the south wall like a drunk. The faded purple velvet fills the room with a pungent, even hysterical fuchsia light. The flunky who hurries around, heavy silver salver slithering in his sweating hands, fears and hates the room. On a soaked and blackened Persian carpet rests the
room’s mistress: an ancient egg, so large the lowest pendants of the chandelier lie about its crown like a tiara.

The egg does not look healthy, physically or morally. From age and dissipation, the pink flesh has hardened and blackened, as if scorched by a terrible fire. Her skin is a mosaic of scabs, and from the cracks leaks a thin, blood-streaked pus. Flies hang conspicuously around, beading on the stained curtains, then rising all together as if jerked up on stiff wires and swished around (and in fact you can see the wires if you look for them).

The filmmakers have contrived to make the egg utterly loathsome, yet seductive in a tawdry way, like an old whore. She wears a stained lace apron the size of a hankie, which serves to render her substantial nakedness obscene. She is both foul and decorative, a rotten tomato oozing onto a doily.

The egg sings a snatch of song in a slurred voice, weeping crocodile tears from every crack. The flunky flutters around, wiping away the tears with innumerable tissues he pulls one at a time out of a box in quick succession, like a stage routine. The tissues stick to the egg; when they are pulled off bits stay behind.

An alarm clock rings: the flunky swishes officiously over to a little marble table and returns with a hypodermic, which he plunges between two scabs. The egg shudders, then hollows her side walls as a person might hollow her cheeks, and sucks the needle dry.

She shimmies, then settles herself. The flies come to rest on her hide.

As she relaxes, the cracks flare; mucous membrane bulges in the gaps. Her slip is showing.

But what’s this? A pecking at the window, a peeking and a
peeping? An innocent little child! Or rather, a child not quite so innocent as she should have been, a bold child who looks through windows, a peeping tomboy who is fascinated by what is rank and sour and self-involved. Not a frank and open child, but a complicated and curious one.

But see, the egg has noticed the child. Her hide ripples, the flies flash blue and green, she draws herself in so the sides of her cracks crimp together. “Let her in,” drawls the egg, and the flunky opens the window.

The child throws one leg over the sill, and hesitates. “Come in,” purrs the egg. Then sharply: “Come in!” The cracks flare all over; it is like a flamenco dancer’s flash of red petticoats. The egg pulls herself up, her fissures spread like wings, or gills, or the frills of a peculiar mushroom. The mucous insides pulse and fizz. Spritz. A heavy yellow vapor stands in a cloud around the egg for a suspended moment, and then wends its way, lazily, toward the open window. It looks like a feather boa come to life, and it wraps itself cozily around the little girl’s neck.

She coughs, sags on the sill, then slips dreamily over and stands before the egg. How can a sphere move like a cobra? The egg dances in front of the girl. “Grease me, little girl. Make my skin feel nice,” croons the egg, and a crockery pot appears suddenly at her base, as if she has been roosting on it. “Butter your egg,” says the egg. “Stroke it on, nice and thick.”

The little girl scoops out a handful of fat and stands holding it uncertainly, then pats it against the leathery wall.

“Not like that, dear. Stroke it in. Find the dry places with your clever little fingers.”

It is tricky work; there are many scaly bits to press the ointment under and around, so she gets very absorbed; and when
she draws near one of the cracks she hardly notices, though the great mass sways toward her, like a horse guiding the currycomb toward an itchy spot, and only when her fingers slide right around the edge of the crust to the slippery interior does she pause.

“Ohhh!” neighs the egg. “Don’t stop! Deeper!” So the girl gets a new blob of fat and begins stroking it on the lubricious reds and pinks, which hardly seem to need it. The walls suck her hands. “Oh, the relief you give me! Deeper, child, deeper!” The child puts one little shoe up on the edge of the rift, and leans forward. She is in up to her shoulder. The egg screams, “NOW!” The girl reaches back with her other toe for the floor, but it is too late; the flunky has rushed forward, and now thrusts the little girl deep into the egg, until she quite disappears. The egg goes very still.

After a minute the egg shifts uneasily, burps, and lays two little shoes in a puddle on the floor.

(Le Bon Oeuf, 1951, Dir. Hervé Blanc, France, 11 min., color, 35mm)

The camera is gliding through an orchard. Large, improbably neat and identical leaves part and slide away soundlessly to either side. We pass through secret green spaces. A chartreuse inchworm is disclosed. It quests in the air, then claps its end to a knobbly twig. We clear a crooked branch. We round a mossy trunk, pass a tidy nest overstuffed with fluffy fledglings. Leaves again, held up like cards for a magic trick, then smoothly removed, one, two, three, to reveal a hill, green, carefully dotted with daisies.

Daffodils wag unnaturally in the motionless grass. Ducks show off their majolica beaks. The little girl near the top of the hill carries a bucket and her fat yellow braids whack her cheeks. A zephyr ruffles her bangs. She looks up.

Lo! The good egg. It descends from a baby blue sky to the sound of wind chimes. The maid drops her bucket and clasps her hands together. The screen goes white. Out of the whiteness, like a reflection in milk, a figure emerges. It’s the maid, but her hair is unbound, her form newly slender. Her transfigured features fill the screen.

The egg hovers above her like a round pink blimp. Jill rises to her toes, stretching her fingers toward the egg. The egg wobbles amusingly and descends a little farther. The tops of the daffodils tickle its underbelly and it jiggles all over with mirth.

Jill rights the bucket and sets it under the egg. Then she leans her face against the side of the egg. The visual rhyme of rosy cheek and cheek is established in a close-up. She begins to palpate the side of the egg with her round fists. Left, right, left, right, push, push, push, go the insistent little fists. Jill’s eyes are dreamy. Birds twirl around the rapt couple.

Quite suddenly, from somewhere underneath the egg (the camera demurs) comes the flow. What looks like pink lemonade splashes, sparkling, into the wooden bucket. Jill’s fists pump the side of the egg. The squirts strengthen, whipping the juice into a froth.

When the bucket is full, Jill plunges both hands into it. She slurps greedily from her hands. Then she sets the bucket on a rock.

She stands. The sky shows through the egg’s suddenly diaphanous sides. Jill’s hands hang at her sides. Slowly, with measured
steps, she approaches the egg. The pink veils part, and she steps inside. We see her turn and seat herself; then the veils are drawn again and the egg lifts into the air. It is drawn away on the wind. Tiny clouds throng around it.

On the hilltop below, a small boy (the tardy Jack) discovers the bucket. The field is suddenly full of village folk, dressed in white. They are tilting their heads back and waving to Jill as she disappears. Then they gather around the bucket.