The Laboratory of Love, page 2
Footsteps approach from beyond my room. They belong to a grown man, I think at once. He passes my door without slowing. As the sound dissolves into silence, I’m already anticipating its return. At this moment, cold and hunger are replaced by hope. Breathing mutates into a synonym for waiting. Now my existence has purpose.
My prayers are answered. Three or four or five days later, he passes my room again and then continues to return at intervals. Does longing trick me into believing that each time he comes back sooner than before? Does desire deceive me that each time his footsteps slow further as they near? Has he begun to pause outside the door, then to linger longer and longer? If my heart weren’t beating loudly, would I hear him breathe on the other side of a separating inch of steel? Would he walk away for good if I cried out to him? These questions belong to a test that will decide if I am worthy.
A key turns in the lock. The door opens. I treasure what happens next. Overwhelming weight, warmth. I welcome these sensations with the joy of every explorer who beholds a newly discovered world. Like phosphorescence and gravity, the act of love has always existed, however much we insist it is our own invention.
At my lover’s first touch, I understand that the green house was always inhabited by another boy. A second visit confirms that this room has been my only home. Our third encounter instructs me that darkness is the only element to which I’ve ever belonged.
Sometimes he doesn’t enter my room to fill me with his love, but cracks open the door only to toss food inside. It has no flavour, it doesn’t satisfy, it could be paper or dirt. I leave the food for my insect friends. I suspect I’m being tested further. My need for nourishment is what has drawn my lover; the end of my hunger would mean the end of his attention. My belly grumbles in the dark as I wonder about the hand that throws the food, then about the heart that moves the hand.
At other times, he jabs a needle into my arm, and I descend to deeper darkness, wake in another room. Except for a slightly higher or lower temperature, and staler or fresher air, a new room might be an old one. Then I discover countless minute differences between the cement skin of the current cell and that of my previous home. But the darkness is constant. A thousand quirks in its character are known and cherished by me alone; like any loyal ally, I would not reveal them though beaten at tedious length. I’ll only say that sometimes I believe I’ve been taken to a room just beside the last one. I’m higher above the world or farther inside it; nearer or more distant from the centre of a city. Yet a thin gold line never shines beneath the locked door. Without this crack of illumination, I have no final proof that the globe has not transformed into a black egg twirling beyond reach of the sun’s warmth and light. The moves from one obscure vacuum to the next have no purpose I can discover, except to teach me that every room is dark and cold and bare.
Each time his footsteps near, my heart pounds more loudly in their rhythm. A thin, mechanical cry, like that of a nestling, emerges from my throat. I don’t know whether I’ll be fed or beaten; my anticipation is an equal measure of fear of hurt and hope for comfort. Slowly these two emotions become inseparable, and pleasure is inextricable from pain. I take satisfaction from each blow of his fists, every brutal kick. Fulfillment floods me when he crams my body’s cavities with himself. His generosity touches me. Sometimes he feeds me afterward, sometimes not. Eventually food becomes as unimportant as light and warmth. When my belly groans, it’s calling hungrily for his hands; the only tastes I savour are the salty richness of my blood and of his saliva, sweat, semen. If I did not starve, he wouldn’t feed me; if I weren’t cold, his body would fail to warm me. Without the darkness, he could not offer illumination.
His visits are unpredictable, and always expected. They occur with a frequency that gradually increases; they’re marked by an intensity that steadily builds. I wonder where this will lead. Feel him push farther into me, like a brave explorer daring to enter more deeply the dark labyrinth from which he might not emerge alive. Maybe he’ll become lost forever in the twisting tunnels, or maybe the rough beast will get him. What glittering treasure in which haunted cave causes him to take this risk?
He has never spoken; nor have I heard him moan, grunt, cry. I don’t know his face except as darkness made solid. If he bumped into me on the street, I’d fail to recognize him. I would wonder if each passerby were him. Strangers would glance quickly away from the small boy with starving eyes.
Waiting for my lover’s next visit, I try to guess whether his face is lined or smooth. Is his hair dark or light or grey? By his strength, I believe he must be fairly young. But I picture his eyes as old, with the sadness unique to age. Nagging suspicion builds that he’s someone I once knew but have forgotten.
Does he miss me when he goes away? Ache for me as I ache for him? I envision him walking from this room—smoothing hair, straightening tie, dabbing handkerchief at a spot of my blood on his wrist. He drives to the supermarket to buy the loaf of bread his wife asked him to pick up on the way home. His blue car pulls into a driveway before a green house. He tosses three pennies to the small boy with hungry eyes who waits on the front steps, then enters the house to greet his wife with a careful kiss. The family eats supper. Afterward the father sits in the living room behind a shielding newspaper. When she looks toward him, his wife reads headlines that scream murder, war, accident. She turns to her husband in bed and he moves away. I should check on Rickie, he says. He stands above the bed in which the small boy lies awake with closed eyes. He looks down at a face as smooth and white as blank paper. His fists are hidden in his pockets. The man doesn’t touch his son; the son’s eyes don’t open. When he sleeps at last, the boy beholds images that make him wish he dreamed pure darkness.
Long ago a small boy was beaten and starved and violated. Even as he grows into a large man, there isn’t space beneath his skin to contain all the enormous, lasting hurt. It must be shared. I feel my lover’s blind need to rid himself of what he still can’t bear. I feel his anger and sorrow when such release does not occur, and the steadily growing violence in his effort to achieve it. He tries again and again to smash through my skin so he can curl his own battered body in my dark room, float in blood like a fetus that knows only warmth and comfort. I would like to kiss away every tear in his eyes, stroke his back with tenderness, suck out all his sorrow. I believe I can save him. Please let me try. Give me one more chance. Yet I automatically protect my eyes and ears and belly from his blows. However much I want to, I can’t give myself up completely. The words of love I wish to utter emerge from my mouth as a high-pitched squeal, which resembles the noise made by a pig being slaughtered and which continues until he forces my head into the pail of waste or fills my mouth with himself. I feel inadequate when my lover leaves my room as troubled as he’s been for so long, for too long.
When he’s gone, cuts and bruises left on my body glow with heat. They ooze sweet pus, which nourishes like placenta. I scratch at the souvenirs of his touch to make them sting more sharply. My throbbing skin assures me that my lover isn’t merely a figment of fantasy. It swears that I don’t always lack human company in the dark. The pain fills the emptiness of his absence. Two words twist and coil and wrap around each other in my mind. Love hurts.
Three times an angel appears. That’s what I call her, since she resembles the winged ornament that hovers at the top of Christmas trees inside green houses. She floats down through the darkness and with her presence illuminates my room. My eyes aren’t used to such light. It dazzles, it blinds. Soft feathers enfold me, wrap warmly around me. Long kisses feed me milk and honey, then balm my sores that never heal. The angel bathes me in scented water and salves my battered skin with fragrant oils. Her wordless murmur means: one day the darkness will turn to light; or, the darkness isn’t so bad; or, the darkness is for the best. With a wave of her wand, the angel’s gone. I hate her. Not because she won’t carry me away on her strong wings. I don’t wish to leave my room and lose my lover and wouldn’t go if begged. My subservience has managed to neutralize pain and cold, darkness and hunger. Each visit from the angel turns those forces back into bitter enemies I must fight until beaten once more. Then, in unison, my conquerors chant: We’re loyal companions, not fickle friends; it’s less painful to live always in darkness than sometimes in light. We’ll win every war, they boast.
Time seems to slow when he’s not here. While waiting for his return, I repeat my prayers: Bless him, save him, bring him back. Or I fill the dragging hours by recalling his last visit. Review that act of love over and over until it becomes a film in my head that can be started with the flick of a switch. Crouched against the wall, I watch the same scenes recur. There are certain favourite ones. Play them in slow motion, make the pleasure last. Scrape myself against cement to approximate, however roughly, the sensation afforded by his loving touch. Smile when my skin screams. Happy.
In the dark, my touch is sometimes clumsy. I fumble with the switch and by accident start a film I don’t wish to watch but can’t halt. I see a boy of five on the front steps of a green house. He wears short blue pants and a white shirt with short sleeves. His arms wrap around his legs and his head rests on his naked knees. Sunlight warms his skin. Music drifts like motes of gold dust through the open kitchen window. His mother is listening to the radio as she cooks supper. Tonight there’ll be macaroni baked soft and warm, with cheese melted among blood-red tomatoes that explode like bombs of flavour. The scent of cooking and the sound of music twine like velvet ribbons around the boy. He narrows his eyes until sunlight enters them like a crack of gold light beneath the door of a dark room. He’s waiting for his father to come home from work. A blue car will turn the corner and approach from down the street. If the boy on the steps looks away, the blue car will turn into another driveway. His father will go into another house, pausing to toss three pennies to another boy, who will bury them like pirate treasure.
After the wrong film plays and the wrong images fill me, my lover stays away for longer than usual because there’s no empty space in me for him to enter. His sustained absence is punishment for my thinking of something besides him. I rock back and forth in the dark, knock my head against the wall, replicate the rhythm we create while making love.
Acute need to hear my lover come back sharpens my ears or I currently inhabit a room adjacent to one where another boy exists in darkness. Through my walls penetrate muffled sounds of brutal attention being lavished upon a substitute for myself. This boy keeps crying out loud after my lover leaves, when he should be mute with gratitude. He must be younger than me, he must be too little to know better. He’s insufficiently evolved to appreciate real love; the precious gift is wasted on him. I seethe with jealousy until I correct my emotion. This is an opportunity to realize how lucky I’ve been each time my lover has chosen to come to me rather than any other boy.
I hear a host of other boys once I detect the first. They must inhabit rooms not only on either side of mine, but also ones above and below and farther removed. I begin to believe this structure contains numerous floors of long hallways lined with hundreds of dark cells. Sounds of incessant crying travel toward me from every direction. I must fight to hold onto the belief that I was my lover’s first choice and that I remain his favourite. It’s impossible that anyone else could need his touch as much as I do or receive it with my degree of gratitude. Soon he has to realize that no boy can replace me, soon he will come back.
Until now, my lover has always returned one or two or three weeks after my visions of green houses and blue cars have driven him away. This time is different. I suspect months have passed since I was last graced with his presence. My skin shrieks to be pounded into pulp. The sound almost drowns out the incessant crying of boys who continue to populate the surrounding darkness. I am frightened, I am lost. How many years have I spent in obscurity, and how much has my body changed during this time? I become further convinced that the boys my lover now visits instead of me are as small as I was when he first came to my room. I’ve grown too big. I’m no longer of any use to him. I will myself to shrink. I refuse to put a single roach into my mouth. If I starve myself sufficiently, love must return.
I become increasingly confused without my lover’s guiding touch. Cries of other boys no longer seem to travel through thick walls or steel doors, but sound as clear and loud as though originating within my room. The sobbing bounces between these walls, echoes through the hollow inside me. At last weeping turns into whimpering, which finally gives way to quiet. I interpret this silence to mean my lover has tired of my younger rivals; like me, they’re holding breath and straining to hear him come back.
I detect a key turning in the lock, but my door doesn’t open. Footsteps move away, leave silence behind. By this point, my skin doesn’t hold even vague memories of my lover’s touch. I must feel him on me and in me, if just once more. As I’ve never dared to do, I call out for my lover. When my fists hammer against the door, it swings open. After a thousand failed attempts to open this door, I believed further attempts were futile. Since the long-ago moment when I ceased trying, I now know, the room has been unlocked. The sound of a turning key has always been my heart twisting open.
I’m afraid to leave my room because it’s my only home. For a moment, fear of loss holds me here. But I must find my lover. I’m suddenly convinced he will never come to me again. He has given up hope that I’ll ever be able to swallow all his darkness. I’ve failed him once too often. Emerging from my room, I move down a long, dimly lit hallway lined with closed doors. Like the one I’ve just opened, they’re scratched and marked and unnumbered. Through steel seeps the sound of boys weeping softly. As my footsteps approach, the cries cease. I sense breath being held, pulses racing with hope. When I pass by, the painful sounds resume in a higher key. I could open any of these doors, fall upon the waiting boy inside, soothe him with my loving blows. But I need such comfort myself and proceed in search of it. The hallway bends. I turn a corner and reach a flight of descending stairs. I open a door at the bottom and find myself on a street at dawn. Night is leaving the world, a red planet is rising in the sky, I am falling into darkness.
Warm. Soft. White. I presume I’m in the arms of my angel, then realize this is a bed with white sheets in a white room. Equally white bandages cover most of my body. A tube runs from a glass tank filled with clouded liquid into a vein in my left arm. The odourless air is too thin for my lungs to breathe, and the light is too glaring for my eyes to bear. My skin is suffocating beneath bandages, blankets, sheets. Neither the pillow nor the bed beneath me is hard enough. I’m drowning in softness. I gasp and struggle until hands hold me down. They’re not His hands. These pink hands belong to men and women in white whose faces wear expressions I can’t read, whose lips issue language I don’t understand. Are these looks of love? Words of hate? A needle sinks into my right arm. It fills me with hope that I’ll waken in a dark room and that my lover will come to me there. Before falling into blackness, I notice a pale sky gleaming beyond the open window. The fresh air entering the white room stings my eyes and hurts my throat. The drawn curtain flutters white as an angel’s wing.
I wake to the same white room, the same bright light. Disappointment. Darkness drains from me in a way that exposes the emptiness beneath my skin, and that leaves me weak and weary and sad. I remain still and silent as the routine around me becomes familiar. Although I continue to wait faithfully for Him, only men and women in white appear. They touch my forehead and wrists with hands weighing as little as air. The tube is taken from my left arm; my right arm is injected less often. My hair and nails are cut. Then the bandages and stitches are removed to be replaced by a thin white robe that rustles like paper. I watch mouths open and close as they make noise I know is meant for me. I strain to summon precious sensations—cold, darkness, hunger—but the bodies that bend over mine refuse to allow me to enjoy my former state of grace. They wish to kill me with cruel kindness. No matter how tightly I close my eyes, some light seeps inside the lids. At night, the lights scattered around me glow like wounds on the skin of darkness.
A man who wears blue visits each day. He sits by my bed and moves his mouth. I wait for his fists to strike. My skin aches more painfully as each sore heals and each bruise vanishes. When the man in blue doesn’t touch me and when I remain silent, we’re both disappointed. Why won’t he lovingly hurt me? What am I doing wrong? I struggle to speak his language as it grows familiar and slowly acquires meaning. Lay me on the hard floor and love me with all your strength, I plan to say when my clumsy tongue learns to move correctly. The man nods as I fight for my first word. It finally emerges. Darkness, I beg.
They ask my name and age and place of birth. They want to know what happened before I was found on the street at dawn. Who did this to you? What was done to you? Where? For how long? I tell them about the dark room but not about my lover. Before that? I describe the small boy who waited on the front steps of the green house. Was that you? I hesitate. Then I mention my angel. I reveal that one day she will come to me again. Lift me onto her strong wings. Carry me back to the dark room. Save me.
They move me to another white room. Sometimes I’m supposed to lie on the bed, sometimes I’m supposed to sit in the chair, sometimes I’m supposed to walk around a large space containing other people dressed in rustling white gowns like me. Eat this. Then go to sleep. Now wake up. I know how to be obedient. I speak and the doctors make dark lines on white paper. They look at each other and exchange single words: shock, damage, amnesia, trauma. The more darkness they put on the paper, the happier they are. I learn how to please them; it’s easy to know what they want. Keep my eyes open and blink the lids. Look at people when they talk to me. Pull the corners of my mouth upwards. Avoid mentioning my angel again, never speak about my lover once. I please the doctors, but they offer no reward in return. No love.
