The Laboratory of Love, page 30
Steam rises around me as proof that processes of transmutation occur continually, occur now.
Liquid flays like hot lashes, for longer than a civilian shower lasts.
Afterward, veils of vapour float around the bathroom. Mist prowling the earth on its very first day, from which any original, unknown form of life might emerge.
Or me.
My physical self, having been enlisted into the service of science again, returns.
Hello, you’ve survived, you’ve come back.
Did you miss me? Do you still need me?
I dress in a clean, off-duty uniform of simply cut loose-fitting clothes.
I unlock a metal filing cabinet in the corner and remove the notebook in which current experiments are being recorded.
At the round white table, I prepare to enter data and observations.
Trace graphs, draw charts, solve equations.
My heart rate has slowed, my temperature has lowered.
I become calmer, cooler.
Like the scientist who has been here all along.
This post-experiment procedure has been developed according to sophisticated mathematical principles. Like any sequence of precisely ordered, perfectly repeated actions, it contains the power of ritual.
Moves me beyond science.
Allows me to live with the illusion that my body isn’t smudged with fresh fingerprints; enables me to airbrush a million stubborn traces of strangers’ oil and sweat from my skin.
To ignore the accumulated souvenirs from twenty years of hands-on investigative effort.
Glandular and chemical secretions, fractions of molecules and atomic particles, fragments of genetic material and broken chains of DNA.
I can almost believe that another tattoo—imperceptible to the unaided eye, as if drawn with invisible ink—has not been added to the numerous others that cover my flesh like a second skin I’ll never slip from.
A species of shroud.
Ritual almost neutralizes the scent that clings to me despite my ablutions.
Procedure nearly cancels out a combination of concentrated odours.
The stench of twenty scientific years.
Tonight I fail to escape beyond reach of the senses. The scent of all the flesh experimented with in the laboratory of love rises in fumes from my notebook. My eyes inflame, my throat itches, my lungs burn. Warning signals puff through my mind: danger is coming, danger is near. The fumes still sicken as they dissolve. My belly clenches, the laboratory spins.
“Settle down,” instructs the scientist inside me.
My sight shifts back into focus. My fingers grip the table’s edge.
I remind myself that every investigation is challenging.
Methodology requires that I participate in procedures while simultaneously studying them with objectivity.
Control what is chaotic by nature for precise ends.
Manipulate activity that seeks to disrupt itinerary.
Work what is wild to a determined purpose.
Near the start of my project, I experimented with methodology by employing two “outside” specimens to comprise the pair required for my research. Physically removed from the equation, I hoped I could enhance the scientist’s observations with my own.
Quickly I found this tactic unsatisfactory.
Incorporating a second subject into an experiment means having less control over an already unruly act.
Increased rewards of observation don’t compensate for loss of critical data obtainable solely through experience.
I realized I had to overcome the challenges presented by my necessary involvement in my research.
I needed to trust that emotional makeup, physical constitution, and early experience had uniquely prepared me for success where most would fail.
I must continually reassure myself that I was chosen for this work.
Selected for sound, supportable reasons.
Not by accident, from whimsy, for fancy.
I tell myself varying stories about how the scientist found me.
Sometimes I suppose that twenty years ago I simply awoke one unwitting morning in the most recent of the cities in which I would pause during my flight from the boys I had once been. They persistently outwitted my escape; they continually clutched at my sleeve with hungry fingers. By this point, twenty years ago, they had already driven me back and forth across the globe countless times, jealously chased away every lover trying to claim me. My resources were drained, and my youth was exhausted. Now the weary light became clearer and truer on each of these afternoons in Tangier or Paris or Jakarta, always revealing more than the day before, as if I were moving from blindness to sight, from confusion to faith, from death to life. Yet for a while, I was unable to understand what my eyes newly saw. The purpose of an existence never before glimpsed remains obscure, even as its contours are created with clarity, without hesitation, in accordance with instructions murmured perhaps in sleep, directions offered by nightingales in the dark, apparently the echo of every lost lover’s voice. An extensive number of complex factors worked together at this moment, twenty years ago, when they would at no other, to permit me to have received the muffled voice that grew increasingly audible during day as well as night, while the illumination it cast became more dazzling. My eyes weren’t accustomed to such pure light; it took them time to adjust, to understand the purpose of the special landscape that my subconscious had been busily constructing. It was not until the first laboratory had been created—in exact obedience to his instructions—that the source of the voice materialized in brilliant light: I summoned the scientist by creating the correct air for him to breathe, I invoked him by establishing the appropriate setting to receive his words, his vocabulary, his language of love. Even as he carefully explained the goal of our experiments, the parameters within which we would conduct them, even as the scientist explained every shining law of my new life, I swooned inside his original seduction, the first syllables he slid into my ear:
Leave the world behind; come beyond with me. I will show you the dungeon, deep beneath your skin, whose hundred cells can hold a hundred boys in solitary confinement. I have the power to keep them down in that dark chamber below memory. As long as you remain loyal to the laboratory, they will never escape to haunt you again. Quid pro quo.
“This is only one more night,” I try to convince the cold light that has surrounded me since I accepted the scientist’s bargain.
My skin prickles, as when frozen flesh is invaded by blood during the painful process of thawing.
I listen for the image in the mirror to agree glassily: Yes, this is just another night on the way to where we’re going.
From the outset, I understood that my investigations into love must be conducted through the medium of flesh: what I seek lies beneath the skin, below bone, under organs, deeper than blood, beyond scalpel’s reach.
I accepted, too, that this path toward the truth would not travel through lush surfaces or shapely limbs.
(Pure science must always practice discrimination for which no apology is required; embracing one theory means coldly denying others.)
Human beings who are encased within less aesthetically fortunate shells have always provided the richest raw materials for research.
My thesis is built upon a single fundamental principle.
When desire denied too long is finally fulfilled, when withheld beauty is belatedly possessed, when longing for wing and flight are at last unshackled: such ecstatic experience can unleash extraordinary reactions that originate from the deeply buried, molten core of love.
My physical self, this form shaped and honed for satisfaction, provides the catalyst.
Bend your bones into a boomerang that will always return you to my arms.
Long before tonight, I learned to suppress distaste for the more physically unattractive subjects who participate in my project.
To stifle instinctual responses to rancid flesh and sagging skin and ominous rashes during intimate contact.
To disregard odours, to quell rising nausea, to bear dry heaves in the bathroom afterward.
(“Aren’t we the sensitive soul,” sneers the scientist.)
To prize what appears repellent as especially valuable to my work.
To honour unpleasant surfaces that challenge me to dig deeper, to dig harder, to unearth from my own subterranean centre responses to what was once repugnant.
Slowly I grow to welcome the appearance at my laboratory door of a decomposing carcass.
I clasp carrion tightly within my arms.
Graze my lips in prayer over every inch of rotting flesh.
Bless each wrinkle, wart, imperfection.
On the evening, several years into my work, when I close my door against a subject brimming with youth and beauty and every other attraction, an embarrassment of physical riches, any doubt that I can successfully complete my experiment vanishes.
I leave longing behind, move beyond loss, enter a sacred zone.
Envision involvement with specimens of ever-decreasing beauty, according to an equation whose enactment can trace a straight line on a graph, until I embrace only beings with missing limbs, running sores, cancers.
I learn to kiss the abscessed eye, caress the encephalitic skull, enter the infected anus.
My study’s final participants will be scarcely recognizable as human. They will resemble an appalling collection of genetic mistakes—a tongue for an ear, a seven-toed foot stemming from a shrunken head—of indefinable sex and age and race; more dead than alive; untouched by another hand, never blessed by a kiss.
This will provide the ultimate data for my investigation and illuminate the holy heart of love.
After seven childhood years in darkness, I couldn’t see by light, I was able to negotiate the brush and fields only when the sky above was black save for stars that spelled a story about a dancing blonde, who with her striptease sidekick and her son orbits between showrooms and stages, who sometimes sings about a sailor: that was the real truth of before, not seven years inside a cage. Now the night revealed what followed the glitter; yes, this sea of sightless stumps came after the rouge.
There is no reason why this evening’s encounter should threaten my controlled cocoon.
The specimen was unexceptional.
The experiment proceeded without incident to a satisfactory conclusion.
If anything, it was disappointingly mundane, unlikely to offer up startling insights or important revelations.
Unlike, for example, a session with a specimen who hates what he needs.
Who reacts violently upon receiving what he wants, upon satisfying what he despises.
Fists against my face, hands around my throat.
Boot in my back, blood in my mouth.
The scientist becomes excited by these instances. They permit him access to especially interesting expressions of love, provide opportunity to collect rare, precious data.
“Excellent,” he enthuses as I spit a tooth.
Whether I find such intense experience personally pleasant or unpleasant has no relevance. Whether I am able to successfully defend myself from it with the knife concealed beneath the alcove mattress, is incidental.
I never asked who, I never asked why.
Still, every encounter, including the latest one, holds value. My investigative skills are, by this point, so highly evolved that I am able to uncover in the least promising material any number of minor points of interest which might, factored into earlier data, be of use.
My post-experiment disturbance tonight may, upon analysis, provide more important data than the activity in the alcove to precede it.
Even after twenty years of investigation, I remind myself, occasional unsettling responses to an encounter are only to be expected. These have always occurred. They have always proven to be isolated incidents, little more than freakish phenomena; nothing to worry seriously about, only a test of my strength.
“Love is our only religion,” intones the belly dancer in Damascus dusk, interrupting her eternal prayer for his appearance. “We invoke his love with faith, we resurrect his ardour with our adoration, he saves our soul with his sex.”
Instead of beginning to record, I warily study my laboratory. It resembles any of the studio apartments housed in any of the buildings that seek ascension above this city on the Pacific coast of North America. (The city’s name is unimportant. This place is merely the latest in a long series to provide a setting for my research; except as a location for another laboratory, it holds no meaning.) Although I have been operating in this apartment for three years, it resembles one newly occupied, before the placement of furniture and hanging of prints and other evidence of a life.
One wall, facing south, is entirely windows; the others are bare white.
Between them, on clean hardwood floors, are visible the few articles necessary for research.
My apparatus:
A free-standing mirror, positioned at the end of the alcove, reflects visual data pertaining to what occurs on the mattress.
Besides the round white table of metal and single matching chair, besides the filing cabinet and portable CD player, the main room contains only a telephone through which potential subjects make contact with me.
There is little to snare the eye, claim attention, provide comfort.
No plants or rugs, no television or sofa.
Compact kitchen, spartan bathroom, closed closets.
Curtains and windows are also kept closed.
Antiseptic sharpens the air; formaldehyde hones its edge.
The telephone is usually silent; the CD player is not turned on unless an experiment is in session. It became necessary to cease listening to music for pleasure upon embarking on my project. The thinnest melody still evoked the most ridiculous responses in me, altered the chemistry of my emotions to counter effect, loosened and softened and encouraged to dream what must remain clear, hard, precise. Now music is merely a mathematical pattern of sound for my manipulation.
There is nothing to offer distraction from the essential procedures occurring between these walls.
Sometimes, upon entering my laboratory, a subject appears unsettled by the severity of the space. Realizing this disturbance could impact on our activity, I provide false assurance, say I live somewhere else, keep this apartment merely to meet men like him.
In a sense, this is true.
My laboratory is a setting only for controlled experiment, for pure science.
For love.
“Are you going to mope and moon all night?” interrupts the scientist.
Turn to a fresh page of my notebook.
Number and date tonight’s experiment.
Identify time, temperature, weather.
Pinpoint phase of moon and tide, position of influential planets.
Target specimen’s height, weight, age.
Ethnicity, race.
I record every word uttered by both specimen and myself, with deconstruction of syntax and vocabulary and grammar.
Every moan made, every sigh produced, with interpretation of timbre and tone.
From extensive experience, by means of highly evolved senses, I’m able to make finely calibrated estimations with conviction.
The exact temperature of his touch.
The precise key in which he groaned.
Alterations in barometric pressure at orgasm.
It was always foggy outside the blue room in Sidi Ifni where you found me. We couldn’t see the ocean through its thickness; we could only hear the boom below, what went echoing against the hills behind, interrupting the meditation of camels in the desert beyond. Even the balcony was tiled blue. It floated in the fogged breath of all the boys who had drowned for love, it suspended us in silver that ascended from the depths, until I slipped away to Goulimine where you lost me to the dancer’s dunes.
However powerfully developed, my senses remain subject to limitations. Once I considered the value of supplementing their capabilities with sophisticated technology, of exploiting audio, video, digital options. Exploring the possibilities of playback, frozen image, slowed motion, amplified sound, computer enhancement. But our investigation is observed best through unaided senses, documented best through the written word, the scientist insists. Commitment to process is key to every important endeavour, he stresses.
I refuse to consider that such insistence actually indicates something else.
(Fixed philosophy, hardened ideology, limited vision.)
The eyes of the boy in the snow were frozen open, but he couldn’t see.
Of course, I record the experiments in a constantly changing code. It is necessary to remain vigilant concerning security. While a fairly simple computer program could probably break my cryptography, precautionary measures must still be taken. Work in progress, particularly that of late—of increasing danger and of elevated intensity—needs to unfold and flower in secrecy.
When a cycle of completed experiments is ready to be offered to the world through publication, I painstakingly transcribe code into ordinary language.
Erase its complicated keys from my memory.
Destroy the original notebooks, dispose of their remains.
Bury them like atomic waste deep in earth above which ground burns, becomes barren.
We sleep in the thistles and weeds, dream of sailors navigating boats through the stars, steering toward a port of peace; it will resemble Eureka, California.
“What they don’t know won’t hurt them,” the scientist explained amusedly when, early on, I wondered if the unwitting participation of subjects in our experiments raised an ethical question.
“They should feel honoured to be involved on any basis,” he snapped the second time I expressed qualms.
They should understand that pure science operates in a sphere beyond muddy morality; in a space devoid of legal niceties, social conventions, polite parameters.
