The Laboratory of Love, page 28
It’s a disorienting experience.
Almost disturbing.
The other night I woke up (perhaps, more correctly, came to consciousness) outside the house half-way up the block where Billy lives. I could not recall the series of steps that led to my crouching there upon the dirt, beside the chinaberry bush, beneath his window. My most recent memory was of opening and then quickly closing the door of the room. For the first time failing to transform my disgust at the stench and filth of your remains into love for the substance that was its source. For the first time failing to enter the darkness and to satisfy what is left of its occupant. Beneath Billy’s window, the spring dirt smelled amazingly rich. I’d describe the scent as a clean darkness. Through the pores of its skin, the earth beneath me breathed in, breathed out. Pulsing at the edge of the yard, crickets kept time like a clock in the May night and reminded ascendant stars they had hours to glitter the dew. The touch of a breeze against my face made me reel; the gleam of grass dilated my eyes; the hallucinogenic heavens swam, swirled, spun.
From the way the world overwhelmed my senses, I might have just emerged from three years within a dark, bare, fetid room.
From the nearest street lamp, a path of light carried my vision inside Billy’s window, exposed his perfect, unmarked face upon the pillow. Although slightly flushed with sleep, his face appeared pale under this illumination. I could see his chest rise and fall, a pajama top patterned with what looked like superheroes; below, the covers tangled around his waist, left his concealed lower limbs to interpretation. The same breeze that touched my cheek lifted and released the curtain of Billy’s open window, with a delicate gesture offering then taking away my view; tantalizing, teasing.
Suddenly I felt angry.
How careless to leave the window open like that.
How irresponsible.
Inviting anyone to enter.
Even a sleepy suburb like this isn’t safe.
(Especially a sleepy suburb like this, I sometimes think.)
All at once, the pain in my head became much more severe. I blacked out; that must be what happened. I next found myself standing in the shower, scrubbing and scouring my skin of its stink with powerful soap.
Of your stink.
Apparently, at some point after leaving Billy, I overcame my revulsion and visited you. Perhaps my vision of Billy compelled the visit?
My vision, my experience.
I intuit that an image is missing from my memory: the absence nags. In the same way that the sound of Billy’s bicycle bell reminds me of something I can’t quite recall.
Something in the darkness I can’t quite touch.
Something significant, I suspect.
Something known to the possessor of the voice that addresses me during sleep.
Trying to piece together what has happened during the blank spaces caused by the headaches causes the headaches to grow worse.
I feel caught within a closed circuit. The synapses in the circuit are produced by a struggle to escape it?
With reluctance, I pick up the file on the bed. Quietly, as if you can hear me from the other side of the wall, I examine its contents:
A physician’s report concerning the physical condition of a boy who, it is estimated (see concurring police and psychiatric reports), spent seven years enclosed within a dark, bare room. Malnutrition: severe. Muscular coordination: poor. Sensory responses: limited. Inability to withstand light: temporary. Muteness: see psychiatric report. Recovery: excellent (underlined). Prognosis: no permanent physical damage.
The psychiatric diagnosis. Trauma: severe. Loss of speech: temporary. Loss of memory: extensive; limited recovery anticipated. Loss of affect: severe, limited recovery probable. Perception of reality: poor. Sexual fixations: several. Prognosis: permanent psychological damage, eventual functioning at minimal levels. (For detailed case analysis, see International Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. XXIV, No. 3, pp 217–249.)
Social services report. Placement of subject: foster care. Follow up visits: social (home and school) difficulties noted. Sexual disturbances: acted out (see psychiatric records). Discipline difficulties: noted. Concern of foster parents: noted. Status: ongoing monitoring required.
Police file. Efforts to establish identity of Case No. _____: unsuccessful. Investigation into circumstances of criminal confinement: unsuccessful. Possible suspects in confinement: none. Motives for confinement: unknown. Final status of case: unsolved; closed.
Court document: John Doe No. _____ will henceforth bear the legal name _____.
At the bottom of these documents lie petitions, dated eleven years later, for their release to subject.
I close the file.
In one sense, it has been closed for twenty-one years; in another, it’s still open.
Do those twenty-one years form a blank space for you?
A synapse in your closed system?
A period of limbo between one bare, dark room and the next?
Between one dream and another?
On the other side of the wall, once more in darkness, you struggle to close the file.
Forever, for good.
If I did not know you better, this information might seriously disturb rather than briefly disappoint me. Initially, I must confess, I’m somewhat surprised by your failure to destroy, long ago, documents which are essentially without meaning, which obviously bear no real relation to our love. I wonder at your decision to allow them to survive for my discovery. To risk our special, intimate experience being polluted by the judgment of the uncomprehending world. Were my love for you less strong, it might now be soiled by the rough, clumsy touch of those systems which must always seek to control and to explain an existence as unique as ours.
Quickly correcting my mistaken sense of disappointment, I reject the documents as wholly as I reject the systems that produced them.
They mean nothing. They explain nothing. They illuminate only the incomprehension of the unevolved world around us.
The stupidity.
Clearly, you left this information for me to destroy.
Call it a final invitation to partake in your experience. A lover’s last gift.
Once again, I am happy to comply with your wishes.
Another match scratches. More fire is fed.
Passing our house these days, Billy quickens his step, stares straight ahead. No longer looks lingeringly, hungrily toward where you once lived.
The smell of rot within the room is so intense I must hold my breath for the few moments I manage to withstand it. Although I continue to replace the bread and water that go untouched from one evening to the next, my visits are perfunctory at best. More would be unnecessary. The entity upon the tiled floor bears as little relation to our love as did the documents I have destroyed. Frankly, I grow impatient with this mass of blood and skin and bone that you have left behind. I am almost resentful at your delegating me to deal with it. There is a danger that if your remains linger too long they’ll cloud the meaning of our love as much as the contents of the file briefly threatened to do. The most important act of love I could perform at the moment might very well be to free us entirely of this mute, motionless mess.
This matter, this muck.
The periods of darkness that befall me occur more frequently and last longer, as far as I can tell. Obviously, I am disinclined to seek relief from the medical profession for the blank spaces or for the worsening, accompanying headaches. The quacks and charlatans have done enough damage. Instead, I take the self-prescribed medication which, due to the stupidity of our legal system, I can obtain only with difficulty. Unfortunately, the substance renders me unable to pursue certain activities that have long played a central, stabilizing role in my life; for example, I’m no longer able to go to the gym. Also prevented from working, I take advantage of the considerable vacation time that has accumulated over the past three years.
The telephone rings unanswered.
Unopened mail accumulates.
Between the blank spaces, I visit the cash machine, the supermarket, the supplier of my medication. At a building supply store, I purchase a sack of lime, as the voice from my sleep has instructed. These excursions are necessarily brief: I must take care that the blank spaces occur as much as possible within the house; to fall into one of them outside exposes me to several kinds of risk. Yet there’s continuing evidence that I still wander during dark episodes. Although I fail to remember coming to consciousness in places I have no memory of travelling to, that’s hardly a relief. It only means I’m left in ignorance of where I go or what I do during times of blackness.
Guess, chuckles the voice from my sleep.
The unknown is dangerous, beats the pain in my head.
Of late, I have often “woken up” to find myself naked in the room. I’m not equipped to describe the appalling loneliness of that experience. How the darkness tells me only that I would do anything, even leave life, to escape it. (I have never liked the dark.) More than once, I have discovered my hands to be stained red, as if with bright blood; a bitter taste would haunt my mouth. For several days after my first encounter with these phenomena, I was puzzled by the elusive nature of their source.
Abruptly, unexpectedly, the explanation slid from the dark back of my mind to the front.
The house half way down the block.
The chinaberry bush.
Billy.
The obscure substance upon the tiles seems to produce a very weak, scarcely audible sound.
Mama.
Help.
Or so I think I hear.
The sound resembles the voice of a small boy who’s frightened of the dark.
It is produced by my imagination, of course.
(The medication has more than several inconvenient side effects.)
The (imagined) voice does not speak again—at least, not while I’m in the dark room.
I must have accidentally cut myself during a recent fall from consciousness. There is a deep gash in the flesh of my inner arm. The sharp sting appears to cause the pain inside my head to recede, if only temporarily. Perhaps one hurt erases the other. I work my tongue into the wound as my penis stiffens.
In the backyard, I touch a match to a piece of cloth. It torn and soiled with what looks like the red juice of chinaberries. The pattern on the cloth shows men of comically exaggerated strength. They are patently capable of rescuing any situation no matter how desperate, of saving any being no matter how imperilled. Flames drop onto the ground by the back fence where ash indicates other flames have recently blazed. A nearby sound lifts my head. The old woman next door is watching from her back steps. Realizing that I notice her, she fades back into her house.
I wonder why I haven’t seen Billy lately. Since school is out for the summer, he should be playing on the block during these sunny days. Perhaps he has gone away to a camp situated among green, scented pines, beside a blue lake of crystalline water. With other boys like him, he swims and hikes and canoes; after dark, they gather around a fire to sing sweetly. Their voices lift high into the clear night, reach to touch glittering stars.
I notice that I see better in the dark, as if my eyes have adapted to a prolonged lack of light. In the room, I believe I detect the matter at the back of the room stirs slightly. Bending closer, I realize this movement is that of worms wriggling in and out of liquefying flesh. Matter is changing form. I smile. This transmutation reminds me that our love has never been static; our love has always evolved. Progress keeps it vibrantly alive.
I waken to hear Billy’s voice cry through the darkness. Help, mama, help. Something’s happened to him at the summer camp beside a blue lake, amid green pines. An accident. He has drowned in crystalline water or has plummeted from a cliff. Long after its actual end, his voice continues to echo through the night. Although it travels from far away, the voice is as distinct and clear as a voice within this house.
The proliferation of wounds I find on my skin suggests that I must be clumsy when most heavily under the influence of medication. I must allow myself to become too close to sharp instruments. In the kitchen, silver knives wink knowingly. The axe leers from the back porch; seductively, a razor shimmers in bathroom light. Where opened to the air, my stinging flesh sings sweetly. My tongue tingles in anticipation.
Once such summer weather would have drawn me outdoors at every free moment, but each week I leave the house less frequently than the one before. It’s not that I fear falling into dangerous darkness beyond these safe walls any more; there is no indication that I persist in undertaking journeys and performing actions without conscious knowledge: it seems that phase has ended. What needed to be done in darkness has been successfully accomplished, I assume.
(I can only speculate, at this point, upon developments occurring within and around me. Each new day I peek cautiously at whatever unexpected event unfolds. For you still control the execution of your secret master plan, and only the owner of the voice that speaks to me during sleep seems to share that privileged information in advance. Kept in the dark: this worn figure of speech acquires fresh potency as its figurative and its literal meanings rub against each other, set off a vibration I feel in my teeth. Clearly, both the darkness of the room and the darkness of my ignorance are preserved by you.)
Still my head pounds, still a voice snarls during my sleep, still the curtains stay closed. Medicated, I stumble through shadowed, scented rooms. The one or two times I venture outside, I don’t bother to greet my neighbours with a friendly wave or to interpret and match their false expressions. The minor role played in my life by these unknowing people has been concluded; they don’t matter any more. (However, someone should warn the old crone next door about the direction in which she watches from her window, from her steps. Too late, she might come to regret the unwise habit.) The street seems empty not only of Billy but of all children. It is the kind of absence that insists upon itself, like the silence that screams.
I’m not surprised when you begin to speak inside me. It’s no secret that your essence entered mine some time ago: I have not mourned you because you did not leave. It does startle me, however, to recognize this interior voice as the same one that has been delivering instructions to my sleeping mind. Quickly I understand that a seeming harshness of tone was always due to the vocal force that is necessary to penetrate unconsciousness. For reasons not yet clear, your voice must communicate during daylight as well as in darkness now.
Of course, it is overwhelming to hear, after all that has happened over such a long time, the push of my lover’s vowels, the catch of his consonants. At first I’m so enchanted by your voice that I disregard the words it forms. In some way, beyond the requirements of current circumstances, you sound different. I wonder if your voice has altered, if my memory of its timbre is incorrect, or if my interpretation of its qualities has changed. Beneath the erotic throb that lifts the hair on my arms cuts a cold, hard edge. Perhaps that edge was there all along. Carefully disguised, not perceived.
Hurry, it says.
The sack of lime, it insists.
Before it’s too late, it commands.
The voice requires obedience. If its instructions are not carried out, I sense, the speaker will swiftly become enraged.
Summer heat has hastened the decomposition occurring within the room at the back of the house. The odour produced by this process is perceptible from the end of the driveway, from the farthest reaches of the backyard; slightly sweet, almost cloying, it mixes with a perfume of flowers grown by the old woman next door. Entering the room for the first time in several weeks, at your order, I notice at once that my approach raises numerous flies or gnats from the remains. The insects tremble above their source like visible ions of darkness. I see that the bones are nearly bare of flesh and surprisingly small. I bend nearer.
This is the skeleton of a child, not of a man.
Someone has secretly substituted a boy’s bones for yours?
What are you waiting for? hisses your voice.
I sprinkle lime over the bones.
White sifts through the darkness like a child’s midnight dream of snow. In the morning, we will toboggan down the big hill behind St Cecilia’s. You ride in front; behind, I wrap my arms around your waist, hold on tight, and close my eyes as we speed faster and faster like the nuns’ beads in the night. If we spill onto the snow, our arms will make angels until Sister Mary calls us in to feast on bread and water. That’s all the nourishment needed by orphans who are always full with the sweetness of Jesus.
Pay attention, snaps your voice. What are you doing?
I shiver as an angel’s wing brushes my shoulder in the dark.
Start as a heavy lid slams in my mind, seals St Cecilia’s tight inside the coffin of the past.
Blink at my powdered fingers. Lick lime, taste chalk.
Rather than interfering with nature, I am helping to quicken its process.
I remember how we would never ingest steroids to stimulate our muscular growth by artificial means. For some reason, this memory strikes me as touching, tender.
It becomes necessary to turn more and more to my medication in order to silence the voice that otherwise speaks incessantly, steadily, scarcely pausing for breath. Yet you were never voluble; quite the opposite, in fact. Perhaps this stream of language is composed of all the words your voice did not speak during the dozen years before you entered the room.
