The Laboratory of Love, page 31
They should know that every act of love is an investigation, whether documented or not.
Upon my parchment skin you drew a treasure map to what you found beneath. It would become creased and soiled by ten thousand clumsy fingers, memorized by as many gold-fevered, glittering eyes.
Now a clear physical sensation runs down my right arm as I record. What transpired on the alcove mattress travels through my hand and onto the page.
Safely there, encased in code, it is removed from my memory, erased from my experience.
Dissociated from me.
I will be able to access this experiment only by reviewing the notebook that contains it.
From the start, I understood the impossibility of completing my long, difficult search for answers without the release that documentation provides.
Impossible for any being to bear the memory, prowling through his blood, of all the eyes that widened before his at the moment of truth.
He lay staring in the snow, a jagged grin gashed into his throat, a second mouth that couldn’t tell who or why.
After recording an experiment, I typically study the notes from previous ones for purposes of contrast and correlation.
Tonight I fail to find release from the act of documenting; the encounter continues to perplex me. I close my notebook, unsoothed.
Each action has its reaction.
The air I’ve moved stirs the bills left on the table by the most recently departed specimen.
This donation will be slipped between the pages of one of the five volumes hidden at the back of the alcove closet, which contain the published records of early investigations, which function as my bank. For the moment, the money is disregarded, unimportant, beside the point.
It is never enough to sustain my work even on the most basic level: electricity and telephone always verge on disconnection; cupboards are too frequently bare; a single thin dime is all I have to make it through the night.
All money is magic, chanted the belly dancer from inside incense before swallowing another silver coin.
I rise from the white metal chair, move to the window.
As if responding to a muffled call from the world beyond the laboratory.
The call of my lost name, my real name, my secret name.
His summons thread through the imam’s wail from the mosque in El Jadida and, as a Paseo de los Santos penitent, he prays eternally for my return and in far-flung airport terminals and train stations and bus depots, he crackles distorted directions back to his untrue eyes.
The curtains scratch open; the window opens with a resisting scrape. Behind me, the scientist clears his throat in disapproval. He doesn’t have to tell me that I’m disobeying standard procedures. That science must almost always be conducted in secrecy.
A multitude of untitled research projects are currently underway at myriad unmarked locations upon the planet. Like mine, they deal with flammable material, tread hazardous ground. They are politically sensitive, morally risky, subject to sabotage. In the wrong hands, their findings could prove destructive on a catastrophic, global scale. They may be officially forbidden by governments that covertly fund them.
Denied by multinational corporations that instigate them.
Clandestine labs operating behind fronts in unmarked buildings at the edge of strip malls or inside industrial parks. Within gated compounds far off public roads, high up in mountains, deep in jungle or desert.
My current laboratory functions in similar anonymity.
In this undistinguished cement apartment building on this unexceptional street.
The intercom at the street door that is linked to the laboratory is labelled Occupant.
The laboratory door itself has triple locks.
The telephone number is unlisted.
In fact, there are two numbers, each with its distinct ring: One through which candidates for experiments make contact with the scientist, and a second, which allows access to the “front,” behind which the scientist can safely operate.
To an assumed identity, an approximation of a civilian self, a construct.
A manipulation of tone of voice, facial expression, body language, behaviour.
A facade of fashion meticulously adopted from magazine layouts and advertisements.
It is essential, when outside the laboratory, that I blend in, escape attention.
Let’s say I’m as much skilled thespian as scientist.
Say it suits my purpose that you judge me to be a prostitute or addict.
Damaged being, lost soul.
Zombie.
Whatever.
Sometimes he assumes another form in hope that it will be the one to dissolve my blinders, erode my shield, attract my eye. In a Tétouan derb, he impersonates a beggar; from rags reaches out a broken hand, whines for dirhams. On a plazita bench in Madrid, behind the church that’s always locked, he clutches a cane as an ancient man. At the mall in Santa Monica, a skinny teen stunts a skateboard, rolls another blunt. He is the overly solicitous flight attendant during an Air India non-stop between Bombay and Algiers. He is the officer who conducts the strip search at Canadian customs. The cabbie who drives me into the ghetto of my mind.
Over the years, as I become more deeply immersed in investigative activities, as the scope of my existence narrows to encompass only this sphere, less communication unrelated to science occurs.
Each relocation of my base of operations, and corresponding changes of telephone number and address, moves me further from reach of an earlier life.
(When I was lost, until I was found, before I was set free.)
Because my research is funded with cash by its participants, I’m able to avoid bank accounts, safety deposit boxes, credit cards. I pay no taxes; I have no employment record. No health insurance. No driver’s licence. I have a criminal record only in several countries that are easily avoided; there are no outstanding warrants. There are six passports, each issued to a different name, each issued by a different government. All are false. The name I use at any given period is likewise fictitious.
Except to telephone and electric companies, my address is unknown.
Except for bills from these two utilities, only advertisements are put through the slot in my door.
Records concerning me do not inhabit filing cabinets or databases of private businesses or public agencies.
As much as possible—almost completely—I cease to exist in official as well as private terms.
Slip through the cracks, off the face of the earth, from my original skin.
Did you miss me?
Do you still need me?
The open window confronts me with a hundred apartment towers rising through the night, confuses me with the lights of their ten-thousand rooms. The same overwhelming number shines across the inlet, on the far side of the bridge.
The light in which I stand is one of many, is just one more.
“Painted scenery,” mocks the scientist at my elbow, “paper view.”
Against the black velvet backdrop, purely silent and hallucinogenically near, an ascending aircraft illuminates a sloping line that replicates the graph of desire I have just traced in my notebook. The rising light hooks my eye, lifts it toward the spangle of stars above, the black ocean beyond.
We row across the moonlit lake toward Christmas Bay, each at an oar, bending backs in time while the train whistles midnight down the valley, pools its echo in the hollow of my bones until your tongue licks my eyes, our abandoned oars sway a waterdance, we drift and cluster, let cold dark current pull.
My skin ripples, as if in response to a subterranean disturbance. The scene before me shivers from stasis, emerges from muteness. Video screens flicker across darkness and distance; shapes shift in their strobe. The city breathes and traffic streams below; stars pulsate above.
“Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels,” mutters the scientist.
Like an alarm, the telephone emits the three short rings which indicate another possible candidate for experiment is calling. I ignore the signal, though once I was always greedy to gather more research, keen to conduct a dozen experiments a day.
Lately, only one encounter an evening is usually possible; even the avid scientist does not advise attempting more.
“Stay away from the window,” he suggests now, a sharper edge to his voice.
As the world outside surges into sound, roars like surf inside a shell, amplifies the echo of the distant ocean.
As the swelling air sharpens with salt, stings my skin.
A moment after falling silent, while its after-tone still intrudes upon the air’s liquid hiss and foam, the telephone rings again. This time it emits only single rings, summoning not my scientific but my civilian self.
This is the first such summons since establishing this current laboratory, I realize. The first in three years.
This realization vibrates like a plucked string inside my mind.
Quivers questions to life, triggers mental motion.
How many political systems have failed since I stepped out of time? Have wars been won and lost? Journeys made from here to stars?
(Who? I didn’t wonder. And why? I didn’t ask.)
As the ringing stops, I turn to the white table to record its occurrence.
Instead, my attention is drawn back to the rooms that illuminate the air outside.
Now I am able to detect that, like me, their occupants are poised before open windows.
They wave like flags, in greeting or in warning, call a thousand impersonations of his voice into the city’s clamour.
You’ve survived, you’ve come back.
We lean into saline air, slant toward its suggestion of spring. In interior canyons, snow melts, uncovers, exposes. In the alley directly below my window stirs a shape darker than the darkness it fills. He magnetizes himself into a substance always attracted by my atoms.
My shoulders twitch; their muscles burn.
The scientist purses his lips.
Impossible that he has found me.
“Watch it,” warns the scientist, his voice now pitched a single note away from the one that preludes punishment. The note that sounds as overture to finding myself slumped against the wall, its white surface stained from another night of cutting, the word Help! smeared with blood beside my head, the knife still in my hand and my sliced skin still singing, the scientist explaining once more that it hurts him more than it hurts me; if I followed standard procedures, this would be unnecessary.
Back away from the window, retreat from its clutch. Breathe the laboratory’s familiar air; accept its acrid taste. The world’s din fades then mutes. It must have been a mistaken call. One random voice thrown through the night. One incorrectly pressed digit among six others. No one knows where I am, who I am, that I am.
I will never keep you from flying, he whispered like a thousand oceans in my ear.
Varicoloured pills spill brilliantly upon the white table.
My fingers hover above possibilities, linger over choice, pluck blue.
Float its essence on my tongue, loll in its luxury, swallow with satisfaction.
“Another,” seduces the scientist.
“Again,” he purrs.
At the edge of my vision, where light meets darkness, where what is known melts into the unknown, his hand hovers in invitation. He wants me to join him on the balcony off the bedroom, beyond the French doors. Once more we will lean together against the iron rail above the narrow Macarena street during the hour when afternoon meets evening and the twang of a plucked guitar ascends from the music store below. Garlic from the corner café sautés geranium air; the slot machine in the bar halfway down our cobbled block pings tunes of chance. His arm across my shoulder holds me inside this winged moment at the same time as we soar above the azoteas and the spires, the river and its bridges, all the way to Matalascañas.
Daylight.
I am curled on the hardwood floor, in the corner of the laboratory farthest from the alcove mattress, without blanket, pillow, clothes.
As usual.
Again.
(As a child, after what happens in the beginning, I form a dislike of beds. I’m afraid of sinking and smothering in asphyxiating softness and seek the safe surface of hard floor, preferring most of all the cube of partly contained darkness beneath a box spring. The people who say they are my parents worry. This is something else for them to whisper about in the next room; their clawed voices scratch through the wall. They consider returning me to the clinic, adding this latest unsettling behaviour to the records of others the doctors can’t diagnose, can’t cure. Instead, for my birthday, they buy me vibrant sheets patterned with bold superheroes against whose image any boy would like to sleep. They buy a firmer mattress for the bed. They tie me to its posts, fasten me in the harness, force more pills down my throat. Finally they give up, acknowledge one more defeat, accept something else they can’t change. Something else from the cage I have to keep, something else too late to forsake.)
Gulls wheel through my line of sight, shriek that last night I neglected to close the windows, draw the curtains. My sleep has lasted longer than usual, the clock informs me; the setting of its alarm was shirked. I failed to return the notebook to the locked cabinet, to hide the donated dollars inside a book.
These minor lapses in discipline annoy my need for rigorous order.
The itinerary leading up to an experiment requires execution as exact as that which follows.
Stiffness in the muscles in my upper back, just below my shoulders, suggests that last night’s encounter in the alcove was unusually demanding. Elements of wrestling were incorporated into the activity? Or of a more unusual sport of love?
What happened last night?
Something went wrong.
Something isn’t right.
A wing of memory wheels across my mind as I shut the window. The trace of a dream swoops past the corner of my eye as I close the curtains. I rub the sockets of sleep, grind away its physical consequences, rid my vision of unscientific conceits.
Sleep is only a process required for physical and mental restoration.
Dreams are not permitted to invade my subconscious, to infiltrate my waking.
Traces of geranium are not allowed to linger in my sterilized air.
“Careful,” murmurs the scientist, announcing that he too is awake.
Move cautiously through morning, as though I have wakened upon a landscape mined with the bones of all the ones who died for love.
As though their rigged, unmarked graves lurk to explode me into the sky.
I make allowances for the after-effects of last night’s pre-sleep medication. The dosage, which I realize at the very beginning, functions as a tool in the pursuit of my investigation. Like the recording of experiments, a valuable device for release from them.
Obviously, I cannot afford to ingest substances that might negatively effect the mental clarity required to organize and cross-reference and analyze masses of detailed data, intricate formulae, sophisticated calculations.
No crude narcotics to damage the prime physique required for my research.
No tobacco, no alcohol.
No crank, crack, crystal.
Shoot up only the heroin of love.
I employ only substances refined with purity, designed with delicacy for precise effects, in laboratories as clinical as mine. After extensive trial and error, I discover those compatible with my most productive performance as scientist.
Certain nights require a pink pill.
(I record my intake precisely; monitor milligrams strictly.)
Other nights need silver powder.
(I remain on guard against the tendency toward an annihilating dosage, which the challenges of investigation can prompt.)
A blue pill is saved for extreme circumstances.
Upon discovery, after an experiment, of tear stains on the sheets, feces on my fist.
Last night I took two blue pills. Did the scientist double my dose in order to accomplish one of his special experiments?
The kind which, much to his displeasure, I still cannot bring myself either to participate in or witness?
Please, no.
Not again.
Maybe the blood I find in the morning isn’t mine. There’s still too much of it, a sickening surprise. My stomach heaves at the mess as the scientist shrieks, “Clean it up; it’s the least you can do, excusing yourself from essential work with silly scruples, dreaming of valentines while I’m left to dispose of the remains.”
I should feel relieved that the laboratory is not splattered with serum of brain or shreds of skull this morning.
Grateful to be spared the scientist’s lengthy lecture concerning the long tradition allowing that lives must sometimes be sacrificed to the experiment in order to make important discoveries that outweigh such losses.
His rant that I am completely hopeless, quite unsatisfactory, he will find another associate if I don’t shape up at once, there are a dozen boys bursting with promise on every block, he can pick and choose, who needs a weakling, a parasite, a nonentity like me.
His silence after a night that went wrong is suspicious.
Quite likely strategic.
After twenty years of intimate co-existence, we harbour few fantasies about each other, the scientist and me. I continue to be grateful that he saved me, that he set me free. But my blind devotion to his beliefs—when I worshipped at his feet and admired each of his ideas—has long passed. And it is many years since the scientist has been equally enamoured of me. At the beginning, he was ecstatic to have found the apparently perfect colleague for an unusual undertaking, after half a century of unsuccessful searching, after decades of disappointment. He was thrilled to have uncovered what was surely the ideal disciple. That was when I basked in his belief in me, delighted in showing him my fervour for his religion, burned with desire to embrace it as my own. I loved to exceed his wildest expectations. I adored making his jaw drop by drawing the richest data from specimens, by offering his eyes the most powerful articulations of love. Until, with astounding banality, as a surprising cliché, the honeymoon ended and the bubble of illusion burst. Gradually I learned that I can never satisfy the scientist. I discovered that he will ruthlessly use any weapon available to ensure the success of his experiment. He will employ a whole arsenal of unscrupulous effects to get what he wants. By turns he flatters or criticizes, encourages or exhorts, congratulates or condemns: always according to a concept that does not take into account my well-being except as it furthers his work. Yes, he is as temperamental and moody and selfish as any artist. Yes, I am intermittently resentful and restless as any prisoner. Ours is a complex union, subject to the stresses of extreme circumstances, intensified by uninterrupted intimacy. We bicker and nag. We humour each other, we ignore each other. I know that secretly the scientist despises me precisely because he needs me. I also know that, despite his protestations, he would abandon me in an instant, without a thought, if a more suitable assistant appeared. And while it has always been clear that my existence will end with the final experiment, as a necessary given, it seems the scientist will survive our endeavour undamaged. Once or twice he has let slip mention of a future experiment in which I will not be involved or needed. I do not deceive myself that he will miss me or mourn me in the usual sense. He has never pretended that the usual sense applies to us. We have left the usual sense behind. Beyond it, I have considered leaving him only once. If I did leave, he would unlock the dark dungeon inside me, release the boys who, after twenty years of solitary confinement, would kill for love.
