The Laboratory of Love, page 33
Usually I make geographic adjustments at my own will, in my own time.
Or upon the advice of the scientist, his insistence.
Sometimes I am motivated by intuition that Asia instead of Africa, for example, might contribute most usefully to my work.
Each shift requires a certain amount of adaptation: research conducted in a new language, maintained by another currency, enacted in altered air.
Close analysis reveals that the results of the experiments themselves are largely unaffected by modulations in language, culture, and political system.
The truth lies beyond primarily superficial differences.
The truth smelts such differences into substances as pure and essential as semen.
Once I am forced to move because of overly curious neighbours.
Once due to unwelcome attention from police.
On several instances because a subject persisted in pursuing me after participation in an experiment and refused to understand that only a single encounter was required of him.
Or I am driven over borders and across oceans for reasons less obvious, less tangible.
When the forbidden view outside a laboratory attaches itself to my sight like a lover’s face that can never be studied long enough.
When the slope of a hill becomes his broad back I must lean into.
When the face of a child who plays in the park at the end of the block appears below me as I rock above a specimen.
When the child’s voice emerges from the mature mouth at his moment of climax.
When such moments pierce the zone of purity necessary for my equilibrium, my dedicated existence. “Why don’t you call the airport?” the scientist will suggest, trying to mask panic beneath a calming croon. “A change would do us both good.”
I have relocated before, I remind myself.
There is no reason why I might not do so again.
And again.
And again.
Shaken like a leaf on its stem, stirred by the force of his breath, the kiss blown strong enough to break me from this branch.
Don’t panic. Don’t run.
Place last night’s notebook in the filing cabinet.
Place last night’s donation inside one of the five books at the back of the alcove closet.
Whatever happens, they will tell who and why.
Publishing early research has presented the only serious threat to my underground existence. It has created a subtle tension between exposure and concealment. I found it simple to present my manuscripts, transcribed from private code to public language, as the work of a fictitious author with a fictitious biography.
Simple to provide, for this author’s photograph, a clipping from an obscure European magazine of a smiling young man advertising the beauty and joy of gin.
I am not interested in receiving reviews of these books.
However much I need it, I am not interested in the money offered in advance or generated by their sale. I insist, rather, that all earnings anonymously fund clinics—specifically, clinics which provide abortion on demand, without cost.
It won’t stop crying however hard she shakes it, however loud she plays the music to drown it out, however long she shuts it in the storage shed outside. A mechanism that won’t turn off, won’t break. It’s still crying on the floor when she returns from the bar the next morning. Ruth said, I told you so, and hung up after she asked if she could come back with it to Brale when it was two months old. The Jupiter Circuit had let her go in January; Diamond Lil had left for Vegas, the hotel was going to lock her out. Snow piles the tail end of dirty winter around the trailer that the bouncer lets her have if he can come by now and then. He didn’t mention bringing his buddies. Didn’t warn her of the spike on the table where she tries to change the baby. Something is wrong with it; it won’t stop crying. Another headache pounds the solution that will make it end. You cross the highway, go through those fields that end in brush, follow the sound of the river. Walk away from the silence in the snow. You hear only the river; they won’t find it until spring.
Because hesitation over unusual conditions imposed upon publication is overcome, because it is deemed worthwhile to make exceptions to standard business policies for its sake, I am encouraged, during moments of doubt in the real value of my research, to believe in it anew.
Until I realize that once again fact has been published as fiction.
Science presented as art.
Perhaps I don’t find out for several springs. Except to pore over my encoded log books, I cease to read at the inception of my investigation: like music, words inspire fantasy and longing, which play no useful role in my essential occupation, but damage it instead.
I avoid bookstore and libraries, but accidents still happen.
Perhaps, after carefully avoiding the terminal’s paperback kiosks, my sight stumbles upon a woman who sits facing me in the departure lounge at Schiphol for the next direct flight to LAX. She is reading the Dutch translation of the third volume of my research. The book is held in front of her to prevent the observation of her expression as she reads. She sits alone, posture erect, although the seats in this lounge are especially comfortable and invite ease. On the unoccupied seat beside her, carefully folded, lies her coat. Beside her feet rests a briefcase. I look up from it and meet, on the back of the book, the smile of the intoxicating young man who advertises gin.
The woman looks at me, looks away.
I will steal the book before our flight is over.
Add it to the first two volumes also abducted but rarely read.
I cannot afford the threat to my morale that even a quick glance at these published volumes evokes.
I am invariably disappointed by the crudeness of my early efforts.
The significance of the experiments seems diminished by translation from code to ordinary language.
Although only a scientist, I need the clarity of a seer and the power of an artist to communicate my results.
I am plagued by the doubt of publishing initial conclusions, which may be interpreted as final, though it is clear that my research is cumulative, always leading up to and preparing ground for the stunning revelations reached at the end.
I am conscious that I may not survive to express such conclusions.
I must balance these two conflicting concerns and realize the importance of disseminating preliminary research, however imperfectly, without delay.
Even misinterpreted, it still holds power, has use.
It serves the world better than untranscribed notebooks, which would appear to unevolved eyes as nothing more than gibberish, just desperate scratches into the surface of the cell, only hieroglyphics smeared with excrement upon the asylum wall.
They say that, technically, you were not locked inside a cage for seven years.
Since the key was always in your hand, the bars only in your brain.
The scars a product of your own knife.
Hesitantly, I open the first volume.
The text appears as untranscribed code.
Like last night’s record, one whose key I have forgotten.
Worse, one whose key I have never known.
The other four published volumes are similarly indecipherable.
For my inability to create poetic effects, I have consoled myself with achieving the straightforward, the clear and exact.
If I fail to communicate the results of research on this basic level, my experiment is worthless.
“My?” interrupts the scientist with ironic emphasis.
“Not yours. Not even ours. Only mine.”
The scientist seems as unperturbed by my loss of literacy as by the invasion of the laboratory. I sense with sudden force what I have often felt in flickers during our long association: I am involved in a scheme whose ultimate aim is kept secret from me; all along, the scientist has provided me with false or incomplete information in order to manipulate my involvement in an experiment that, in fact, has nothing to do with love, and everything to do with deception.
I am as ignorant as the unwitting specimens who visit the laboratory, only another specimen myself; we squirm together beneath the microscope, fry in its focal light.
Everything that is happening now has been arranged as perfectly as a poem to elicit my reactions to an experiment now inaccessible to my comprehension?
They want me to draw pictures, they want to talk about the pictures. Why the boy lies naked in the snow. Why he doesn’t wear clothes, why he wears only one shoe. Why he doesn’t move, why he doesn’t breathe. Why a second mouth grins open on his throat. It looks like the lipstick with which Diamond Lil drew red hearts on the speckled mirrors, laughing.
Reaching farther back into the closet, I remove the valise that, despite the scientist’s disapproval, I have carried with me since he found me. Some of its contents, I suspect, pertain to my forgotten life before the laboratory:
A plastic whistle, a Cracker Jack ring, a purple feather from a boa.
A shell that holds the echo of a sea, an envelope filled with grains of desert sand.
A postcard of Eureka, California, its message, Miss you like crazy, signed with a lipstick kiss.
Some of the valise’s contents were, I believe, left behind by specimens when they left the laboratory. Dazed by their experience within my arms, scarcely able to remember their own names, they dropped pieces of themselves as they stumbled away.
Maybe I find a comb fallen beneath the table, sunglasses left beside the bathroom sink, or articles whose abandonment is puzzling, implausible:
A wedding band, a driver’s licence, car keys, one shoe.
A wallet-sized snapshot of a family in front of a Christmas tree.
I turn all these objects over in my hands, feel which ones radiate the heat of meaning for me. It is difficult to judge which mementos pertain to my forgotten history and which hold value only for a stranger. I sift through uncertainty, wonder if in fact everything in the valise belongs to me, is a talisman of an experience that I have had but which the scientist has kept secret from me.
I have piloted an airplane, worked in an office, fished with friends.
I have danced at my own wedding, balanced my son on my shoulders.
Try on the wedding band, try on the single shoe. See if they fit, if they claim me. Imagine constructing a being who belongs to this assortment of disparate objects. Who would he be? What would he look like? How would he love?
The scientist peers over my shoulder, snorts in disgust.
“Do you really want to remember? Do you really want to know?”
I snap the valise shut, shove it back to the rear of the closet.
Knuckles knock the closed chambers of my heart.
Let me in, let me out.
I weave to the bathroom, claw at a vial.
No.
Medication at this hour would incapacitate me for tonight’s experiment.
The correct response to this situation has been drilled into me:
A brief rest should place minor challenges into perspective, transform irritations into actual insignificance, restore what is still a perfect instrument for science.
Recuperation for which the hardwood floor appears inappropriate for once.
My alternative, the mattress in the alcove, is almost acceptably hard.
But it is disarming, deceptive, dangerous.
Even unoccupied, apparently innocuous within a skin of sterilized sheets, it throbs with the unmet longing of all the specimens who have squirmed upon its surface, it vibrates tensely with the undissolved energy of their unreleased desire, seethes with the toxins of their tears.
Even when I give them everything, it is never enough.
After, the dancer declaims, we are only the mirage of their oasis.
Even after they have sucked every drop of fluid from my spine, they slather thirstily.
Even after they have masticated each muscle of my heart, they drool hungrily.
It swamps the alcove mattress, my porous body would sponge it up.
Soak through bone, seep though cells, infiltrate blood, osmose into dreams.
Confuse me with belief that I am the specimens I study.
As though a single blossom resting briefly upon a surface has the power to permanently banish all fever beneath it, the power of a poppy opening its opium arms, offering perfumed invitation into the alcove, push into the drift and descent of dream.
Tap your cane blindly across the Algeciras square toward me and at Tarifa boom your voice beneath the surf beyond the green wall and drum your reach through beaten Morogoro night. Or its only a branch knocking against the cabin that turns the world in my arms, breathes you into my back. Only some pine outside, unsettled by a wind risen from the lake, swept down the valley. Only the Morse code of the indivisible dream.
The knocking isn’t random.
It is a determined sequence of sounds.
A prearranged code to gain entrance.
Persistent, insistent.
The percussive pattern raps on my memory.
Let me in, let me out.
You knock on the stone wall that separates our cells for several dark years before I understand your coded language of love.
It takes too long to pour myself back into my sieved skin; the signal stops before my scattered bones gather themselves into a body, my cane hand gropes darkness too slowly.
I open the laboratory door upon an empty hallway as the elevator sighs shut, begins its hummed descent to the surface of the darkening world.
He was here again, he has gone again.
The echoed pattern of knocking unravels its code in my mind, informs me that I have been forced to alter my landscape with exponential frequency over the last ten years, each time toward an always narrower escape, away from always more dangerous circumstances. Informs me that, in fact, I have not inhabited this laboratory for three years. Informs me that, in fact, it has been only a matter of months since the last close call.
Since the last time I was found.
Or since the last body was found.
“If I conceal information from you,” hisses the scientist, “it’s for the greater good. If it weren’t for your incompetence, relocation would never be necessary. So grease your lips and get ready for the salt mines, sissy.”
Time lost to temptation, day lost to night.
Neglected procedures have left me hungry, dirty, disoriented. My shoulders’ morning ache has turned into a throb, as if I have been heaving heavy burdens instead of resting.
Quick:
Flick switch, elicit light.
Shower, shave. Fix hair, fix face. Slope into uniform of seduction.
Make mirror hot with what they want to see, have to reach for, need to touch.
Ready for tonight’s specimen, ready to receive his call.
It occurs within five minutes. I answer it correctly, on the second ring. As the correct identity. With words and voice which reel a participant in.
With modulated vowels and assumed accent, he attempts to pass himself off as a suitor for science initiating telephone contact. A catch in his tenor, a crack in its pitch, causes me to break the line in Toronto and Jakarta, in Ankara and Toulouse.
Shake my head, toss away its tricks.
Not his voice. Not my voice.
A suitable candidate for experiment. Yes. Perhaps even an especially interesting one. I provide him address, intercom code, floor, and door number. I’m not overly excited, not inappropriately pitched, not unfavourably flustered. I am as calm and blank as I need to be.
“You’ve done this ten thousand times before,” soothes the scientist.
“Do it one last time until you need to do it again.”
Dim lights, close windows, draw curtains, light candles, begin music.
The scientist coils on the metal chair, prepares to witness, watch, observe.
Should I remove from the alcove closet one of the props stored on its shelf? Did I intuit on the telephone that tonight’s specimen might usefully respond to one of these implements?
Whips and chains, restraints and gags; variously sized and shaped objects of insertion.
Probes to delve deep into the truth as well as less obvious experimental aids:
Carefully chosen symbols with power and purity to evoke heightened responses, beyond rational proportion to their banal source.
Something as simple as the most ordinary article of clothing.
Any uniform of innocent youth, any carefree costume of athletic endeavour.
Pristine, perfect.
A skateboard aslant the hardwood floor. A dumbbell at rest before the window. A baseball glove to take him back, to release twenty-five years of longing, to expose the truth about love.
Like the one he wore playing catch with the boy across the street on summer evenings when the quality of air, its pressured composition, alters the pitch of their voices as they toss their secret back and forth, re-tunes what they call to one another into a newly discovered language, sharpening its note to one they have never before heard in their own voices across twenty or thirty feet of dampening grass. There is enough twilight now to blur faces, warm and cool at once, a medium for moths and the squeak of the Carpenter’s screen door, for soft thuds against old leather.
I glance from the closet toward the scientist.
“No,” he shakes his head, as knuckles tattoo the laboratory door. “Not tonight. Get ready,” he repeats in the special tone, electric with excitement, that he adopts whenever he feels that my dedication to our cause might be wavering, whenever he wishes to falsely inspire me for one more unshared reason, whenever he wants to trick me into believing that the next experiment will be the final experiment, the one we have been working toward all these years, the one I was born to die for.
I’m not ready after all. Not ready to investigate his familiar eyes, not ready to admit what they ask. Not ready to watch him undress, expose his humble flesh, its erected need.
