The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories (9 page)

George had sneered at this music when he was a kid. Now it was the only true and necessary music for him. He listened to it on headphones while he worked.

“They call them ‘nervous systems.’ Baloney. They’re people,” George told his therapist. “The so-called
system
I fell in love with had more personality than I do. He loved tin lunch boxes, exotic weapons, tiny sugary cakes. He had delicacy and whimsy, but also the thirst for knowledge. Think Audrey Hepburn as Marie Curie: a pretty dress and a pocket full of radium.

“He was a kind of tuning fork. He vibrated with a perfect pain. I trued my pain to his and my pleasures fell into harmony as well. I had never felt so much, but it was nothing beside what he could feel; he was a perfect receiver. But you could see that for him, pleasure also hurt. There wasn’t any difference, really, between pleasure and pain.”

George got fired.

“It’s not that you’re not doing a good job, because you are. It’s just that the other fellas find you … unnerving.” The boss had a good laugh, then clapped George on the shoulder. “Sorry about that!” He composed himself. “We like you, George, and it’s good sensitivity training for the guys to learn to work with someone with your condition, but frankly you get on their nerves and—sorry! Sorry! And output suffers. I’ve got to ask myself what’s best for the corporate body as a whole. I’m thinking it’ll be better for you, too, in the long run. You’ll be able to put in for unemployment, take a little break, change of pace. It’s gotta be good to get out of temptation’s reach—right?”

As he left, he heard someone mutter, “Nervous Nellie!” An
uneasy laugh rippled around the room. He put on his headphones.

“One minute, a bundle of nerves, the next, they’re demanding Purcell, performance art, the times of their lives,” George told his therapist. “Oh, it’s so hard to watch them, swaying and longing. They want to be ballerinas. They want to marry Bluebeard, be tempted, and rub and rub at the bloodstain on their finger. They ask for frocks, opium, a ruby—just one!

“They look nothing like us. They look like a gardener’s experiment run to seed, they look like macrame sculptures. But they appreciate us, none better. They want to try taxidermy. They say, ‘I’ve got stigmata!’ They love Soutine, Ensor, tap dancing. They know how to live.

“They’re not aliens. They are not animals. Give them a break! They are newborn, and terribly easy to hurt. Let them attempt the French horn, what harm can it do them? Give them typewriters. I’m seeing this now. I’m wishing I could have him back, start over. Ever read
Frankenstein?
I didn’t give him the nurturing environment he needed. I was too, I have to use the word, unnerved.”

“Why don’t you go home for the holidays,” his therapist suggested. “It’s your birthday, too, isn’t it; you’re a December baby. You’ve got some free time now. Touch base with family. Consider letting them in on what you’ve been going through. It’s a risk worth taking.”

“It’s that time of year again, and here’s your friendly fireman to deliver our annual safety tip: keep nerves away from bare bulbs and candles! Nerve tinsel is only safe for trees without Christmas
lights. It looks pretty, but it’s a real fire hazard. The same goes for garlands. Nerve wreaths are safe, but wear rubber gloves if you weave your own, and don’t hang them within reach of the little ones.

“Let’s keep one jingle bell from ringing this December: the fire bell!”

“My word, that’s a nice suit,” said George’s mother. “A bit flashy, maybe. But it certainly has a nice hang. You must have lost weight. You look gaunt. Have some birthday cake. George! Take off your headphones while I’m talking to you.”

“I love you, wrecker of homes, ruination of family holidays,” George wrote, “because you’re a lightning rod, a perfect conductor for electricity and orchestras, a magnifying glass in the sun with a wisp of smoke sidling out from under it. You’re a one-note solo that pierces our eardrums. You’re a jungle gym heating up under the sun, branding our baby fat.

“I love you because flesh is stupid, like everything we build in imitation of the flesh: concrete blocks, sofas, airbags, all these hunks of dumb stuff that protect us. You’re the cure for this sinus infection that stands in for a life, all the gluey textures of social intercourse and the bland obstructions. I’d carve off my own flesh in strips, leaving only the nerves, to spend one moment in pure apprehension. I want the skinny.”

“How could you, George? I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous. This is just a story you’ve cooked up to try me in my old age. You look terrible, you look sick, you’ve got some crazy ideas in your head, they’re probably hallucinations from not
eating. Here. One slice is not going to hurt you, and I won’t hear any more about this so-called love affair; you’re just trying to shock me.”

“I know this is unreasonable, that only a fanatic can’t forgive the pileup of innocuous by-products of the life-well-lived. Matisse (the pure line, the untempered aquamarine) compared a painting to an armchair, and Dickens made people laugh. I know the guru on the mountaintop is just a cartoon. Real life is lived in the details, the plastic Teletubbies cups and the bottle resealers that don’t quite work. We drop dead cells by the billions and go racing on in a flurry of dandruff, we fill holes with empty Yoplait containers, there is no economy to our carrying on, nor should there be. I suspect that only the comfortable value pain. But I want a short, arachnoid life of art and acrobatics and leave the curds and whey to others. I want a life like a squib: one sizzle and I’m out.”

“For me? It’s not
my
birthday.” She ripped the paper off. “Well. Now that’s what I call a hat. Where did you get your sense of style? Certainly not from your father. When will I have any chance to wear something like this out here in the boondocks? It certainly is elegant, though—”

“Don’t try it now, Mom. Mom! Don’t—”

After they had extinguished the blaze, and Mom had settled her second-best wig on her head, pointedly allowing the once best to sizzle on in the kitchen sink, George went to the upstairs bathroom and rid himself of the cake, making no attempt to keep the noise down. Then he went out. He walked to the edge of town, grinding his teeth gently together, reflecting on how the freshly acid-washed enamel made this more of a rubbing
than a sliding sensation, and subtly unpleasant. He crossed the drainage ditch, stepping onto what looked like a solid bank, and his right shoe filled with icy water. The cold began to wick up his wool sock. Right, notice everything, he told himself. Pain and pleasure. Better to burn up than to fade away.

An image came to him of the nervous system—no, his
true
love—standing by the bed, his head in flames. He suffered this image to remain, though a tiny sound broke from him; he heard it as if it were someone else’s. Darling, his lover had signed, smiling, insofar as he could be said to smile. Oh, that was the killer, he didn’t know he was burning. It was all one to him: flames, George’s touch, a breath, laughter, death. What George felt about this: pity. Guilt. Also envy.

George passed among the nerve fibers in his birthday suit, going in deeper.

It could happen, thought George, he could rise again. A scattering of fibers that missed the hopper at harvest, a tidal wave of magnetized particles from the sun, a brief disturbance in the fields, and he could come again. Love’s an accident waiting to happen.

The field began to hum.

Being Excerpts from: A DISCOURSE CONCERNING DILDOES: WHEREIN FALSE CONCEPTIONS ARE REPREHENDED, AND THEIR TRUE AND PROPER ENDS ASSERTED AND VINDICATED. THE SECOND EDITION CORRECTED AND INLARGED. TO WHICH IS ADDED A GENERAL HISTORY OF DILDOES. WHEREIN SOME CHARACTERS OF DISTINCTION BETWEEN TRUE AND PRETENDING DILDOES ARE LAID DOWN AND BY MANY THOUSANDS OF EXAMPLES IS SHEWED WHAT THE DILDO HATH BEEN FROM THE FIRST AGES OF THE WORLD TO THESE TIMES. IN RESPECT OF HIS BODY, SENSES, PASSIONS, AFFECTIONS: His Virtues and Perfections, his Vices and Defects, his Quality, Vocation and Profession; and many other particulars. Collected from the Writings of the most approved Historians, Philosophers, Physicians, Philologists and others, by ANONYMOUS, London: Printed for F. Basset, at the Rose and Crown in St. Paul’s Church-yard, 1678.

What is a dildo? The question is very obscure, according to Paterculus, full of controversy and ambiguity. Saith Dandinus, I confess I am not able to understand it; we can sooner determine with Tully, what they are not than what they are.

In former times, the Sadducees denied that dildoes existed. So did Galen the Physician, the Peripatetics, even Aristotle himself, because they never saw them, and if any man shall stoutly maintain that he hath seen them, they account him a timorous fool, a melancholy dizzard, and a dreamer, and yet Ummidius of his credit told Psellus that he had once seen one. And Leo Soup, a Frenchman, will have the world to be as full of them as flies, and that they may be seen, and withal sets down the means how men may see them.

Wecker relates of his father that after the accustomed solemnities, in 1491, 13 August, he conjured up seven dildoes, some ruddy of complexion, some black and saturnine, and some pale. The same author will have some of them to be desirous of men’s company, very affable, and familiar with them, as dogs are; others again to abhor them, as serpents do.

Fiery dildoes or
dildes fatui
lead men often into rivers or precipices, saith Lipsius, whom, if travelers wish to keep off, they must pronounce the name of God with a clear voice, or adore him with their faces prone on the ground. Likeways these sit on ship masts, and never appear but they signify some mischief or other to come unto men. The Polonian Duke calls this apparition the Heavenly Brothers. The King of Sweden had an enchanted dildo, by virtue of which he could command spirits, trouble the air, and make the wind stand which way he would,
insomuch that when there is any great wind or storm, the common people are wont to say, the king has on his conjuring dildo.

Of a woman’s fair hand, which rose out of a lake, holding a shining dildo, we read in many of the Ancients, such that it may not be doubted; and to this dildo many noble deeds are credited, many a citadel vanquished through its unimpeachable might, etc. And again of a dildo we read, which appeared to the daughter of the melancholy Duke of Cleve in a dream, which was so beautiful, that upon waking she pined for it, and tore her hair, and could not be comforted, and her only recourse, though that unavailing, was to sleep, and hope the dream would come again; this dildo really existed, as Necromancers learned, but in far foreign lands, but the Duke so loved his daughter, that he set out on a quest, in great peril of his life, and bested many monsters, as is told in the Epic, to win the dildo and bring it back to her, and when she beheld this apple of her eye, she sat up in bed completely cured. And Weenus tells of a lady that so loved her dildo, that she begged to marry it, and when the pope spoke against it, she ran mad, and dressed in rags, and fled to the greenwood, and there lived in sin with her paramour. There are also sad tales of dildoes who fell in love with their keepers and were given horns by mortal lovers, and humorous tales of dildoes in nunneries that went limp at last from surfeit. In Eastern parts, as travelers tell, a certain dildo was recognized by infallible signs as a reincarnated holy man, and was dressed in fine robes and gold dust was put on its head and it was treated with all honor once paid the man himself, and gave comfort to many and, some said, cured women suffering from melancholia and other nervous afflictions.

There is a foolish opinion, which some hold, that dildoes are mortal, live and die, that they are nourished and have excrements,
that they feel pain if they be hurt (which Dr. Guin confirms, and Rivet justly laughs him to scorn for), and, if their bodies be cut, with admirable celerity they come together again. The cautious Godefridus sets this condition, that the dildo must in such cases be possessed, for that this does occur is common knowledge, and also well set forth in reliable Histories by Gellius and others.

A dildo may be made of air, as Suetonius confirms, which is a supple and lasting substance, and a very gentle fricative; it may be of coal, or hammered copper, in which case the inferior workman may yet prove the better friend, for what delights in a candlestick may disappoint in a dildo, says Busbequius, as cited by Pigiron, namely delicacy, sheen, and regularity. A dildo may be of fired clay and sprung from a catapult, “at a fixed or moving Target—very moving,” as the wag Pistol has it. It may be of clotted cream or curl papers. A lead dildo is called a Dutch uncle, a dildo proceeding unnoticed past a sentry post is called a silent partner, a dildo spoken about but not yet seen is called a summons-to-court or a man-about-town. A wicker dildo is popular in equatorial climates, as Kornmannus relates, and this is called a windlass or an airy fairy. Nicknames for dildoes are too numerous to list here; some in common use are: dried haddock, Welsh rarebit, gay blade, abigail, alderman, woodpecker, bum steer, bedpost, and beau-nasty.

A blue dildo is for remembrance, a red one for ruth, the rare silver dildo is for the first-born son on reaching his majority. In ancient texts it may be seen that a dildo of Moroccan leather is suitable for a lady of the merchant class, while her husband may sport one of Cordovan leather. If it be made of pigskin, the lady is said to be “high on the hog.” Gentlewomen, however, use ivory if their husbands can afford it; often this becomes an
heirloom, passed down from mother to daughter, kept in pride of place above the mantel, and passed over while many another ancestral treasure is borne away to be sold. Often these are finely figured, in low relief, though this practice is condemned by the stern Schottus, who calls it “a vanity, a species of idolatry, and injurious to the liver.” A charming variant with an ancient history is the little horn dildo, imprinted with the alphabet in upper and lower case, the nine digits, and the Lord’s Prayer. A hole was bored through the handle, and a cord was inserted so that the dildo could be hung from the neck, wrist, or waist.