Primordial Soup Read online

  His lips smelt of stale red wine. His torso, though dark meat, proved tough to my probing fingertips. His earlobes were soft, but he had dabbed a strong temple-like scent, maybe a Hindu cologne, in their proximity and this repelled my intentions. There was little meat on his wrist and ankle. His buttock hairs curled like those of a bucolic beast, and smelt as musty as their cheeses. His sausage looked redder and rawer than ever. I took hold of it, yet procrastinated for the harder I squeezed, the more distinctly I detected a heartbeat inside and pondered whether or not I should club it first with a dough roller.

  He placed himself on the hob, one hairy foot on the worktop, the other in an open drawer. Before I knew it, the raw sausage was forced into the depths of my throat. Gagging, I struggled to pull my head back up, but he obstinately pushed it back down. He swung his hips in a way for it to detach and slide on its own down to my stomach. I turned my head in the nick of time, only to receive it like a spoon of baby food in the cheek. It was the worst predicament of my life. I didn’t really want it anymore. There was nothing tasty about it at all. Nothing to make such a big fuss about.

  With a groping hand, I switched the hob on high. My stomach growled at the smell of his buttock hairs warming. I was relieved to know I was normal.

  “Take it, take it, it’s yours,” he claimed, in that diabolic trance I knew too well.

  I deferred my aim, gently sucking out a drop of juice here and there, while waiting for the hob to get hot enough to grill at least the skin.

  “Yes, yes, get ready, get ready to swallow it,” he advised considerately, for it was about to disconnect.

  Every muscle in my body tensed as I waited for something frightful to happen. I rolled my eyes up at Professor Ranji. He was sitting there, his eyes shut, his mouth open, panting like a dog locked up in a car, pinching and turning his own breasts like he were fine-tuning a transistor radio. And I leaning forward as though I were worshipping him. The hairs on his body had lost their fluff, totally flattened by his sweat. The linoleum floor was a mess, apples and oranges had run away into the corners, relish and mustard stains gave it the look of a dirty plate.

  Eventually, Professor Ranji noticed there was less activity on my behalf. He gave my hair a few brutal tugs as an incentive. That is when he let out a scream that was so loud, it joined the scream of every newborn babe, of every jungle cry, of every animal since the dawn of life ever to be unwillingly eaten. I was overtaken by a sudden rush of gastric juices when the sausage was plucked out of my mouth. Professor Ranji rolled on the linoleum floor, screaming.

  A smidgen of skin smoked on the hob, as well as a generous portion of a meatball. With a knife, I scraped off what I could. Like foie gras, I caked the buttery meatball on a crust of bread and delighted in it. The skin, I picked up by the hairs. It wanted more elaboration. A pinch of salt, pepper, and herbes de provence, and the earth spun under my feet.

  CHAPTER 17

  Professor Ranji did not come to class on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. He did not call, send flowers, or write. The first days, recalling what I’d eaten, I felt hungrier than ever and wished for more of the same. The French say, “L’appétit vient en mangeant,” and I hold this to be true.

  I spent those afternoons marinating Professor Ranji in my mind, in lassi and rose petals. I rolled him in unleavened dough and sharp Indian spices before deep frying him, set his crispy carcass on the sheets of my bed like greasy French fries on paper towels. The very thought of him fed me intravenously with the sweetest nectar I’d ever tasted, that is what made the experience so unique, for I did not taste anything in my mouth, but feeling it in my veins, I knew it was sweet. I was tortured with another feeling, as new to me. It were as if I had left parts of myself behind in his possession, and could not long survive if he personally did not return them to me. I was living, more than knowing it, I felt it. How ironic that in the most heightened moment of my life, I was willing to give my life to him, allow it to be transformed into a food, ready if not begging to be eaten and discarded.

  But deprivation curtails appetite and I found myself playing with the sheets of my bed, making turbans on my knees, mummies out of my limbs. I could not believe it; his flesh had been welcomed into mine, yet this meant nothing to him, not even enough for him to pick up a telephone. At first, I found excuses for him, but I had to face the facts at length. Professor Ranji simply passed his meat around to whomever would take it.

  Within a week, I discovered that instead of offering me a caloric boost, what little I’d consumed of him was actually robbing me of my usual energies and happy disposition. Basically, it was a tapeworm eating away inside me.

  A shiny red Christmas garland was taped around the name tag on Professor Ranji’s office door. We were still months away from that time of the year. I knocked vainly with that dull feeling one has when the door already feels abandoned, knowing no one is going to answer, but needing to alleviate the frustration on some object.

  “He’s ill,” the department secretary informed me as she tacked a poster on the corridor wall with twenty-two pairs of dancing X’s, some long-legged, some short-legged, all joyous, though none had heads. This miraculous ballet is called “chromosomes”.

  “Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  “His wife said not for the time being.”

  I felt humiliation and sadness stirring in me, until they mixed into one, and I hated him suddenly. He hands out his flesh to anybody. Yet, Christ does the same, I thought. Still, it was different. Could this be what the Bible meant by adultery? Yes, it sounded quite right “adult” – ery.

  A fly landed on the corner of my mouth. I hit my face. I blew my nose violently. When I opened my eyes, Dr. Timberland contemplated me with the worried concern a true Christian might feel for one gone astray. In large letters, he had already written SIN on the blackboard.

  Dr. Timberland was a disappointment to the eye in comparison with Professor Ranji. There was no meat whatsoever on his face, not even enough for a cold cut. He wore thick black glasses, which from some bony angles made his bleached blue eyes magnify like an eerie hallucination. Deprived of meat and muscle, his buttocks were indented and his legs, arched. His mouth was a vague dash, but when he smiled, the thin line opened and stretched into a large cavity as though his face could be literally peeled off. His teeth were a few millimetres too short, which gave him the benign look of a born vegetarian.

  Yes, I thought to myself, he must be popular with women, and extremely beloved to have achieved a thinness like Christ’s. I contemplated him days on end.

  I wished for willpower, yes, prayed for the willpower to stop hungering for him. I cannot say that I was never alarmed by the contents of my fantasies. It was always the same. There he was, calculating inside a microwave oven. Behind the door, one could hear the eruption of the mushroom cloud, a blown up replica of his intelligent brain. When he stepped out, his glasses were intact but the skin hung from his bones. His eyes were melted and bubbled like raclette. With my teeth, I scraped off the feverish skin, tender as the foreskin of a newborn child. Particles like fig seeds popped out of the taste buds of my tongue and my raw face burned like chilli con carne.

  Dr. Timberland ran back and forth, equalizing letters and numbers, x = y2, y = 2x – x2, sin’s and co sin’s. A parabola fell down, another stood up, one parabola was large enough to contain a feast of fruit, another so thin that only a stork could have drunk from it. He placed his notes, meticulously handwritten into his briefcase, patted them as if he were putting them to bed; he locked the briefcase with a tiny golden key. He had those long, bony fingers one easily associates with pianists, or artists before they’re well known (and well-fed).

  I pushed my way to him through a forest of standing bodies and intercepted him just as he descended the podium.

  “Dr. Timberland. May I see you a minute in your office?”

  I had grown self-confident. I rubbed coconut oil into my legs, sprinkled cinnamon in my arms pits, kept a vanilla bean in
my bra and a prune stone in my underwear. That, I was certain, had something to do with it.

  Dr. Timberland avoided my eyes, glanced at the door desperately. Four other girls from our class approached him. His eyes shifted nervously left and right, exposing the whites before he left the auditorium. He hurried down the hall without acknowledging our presence. His introverted mannerisms made me feel like we were attacking him, and tempted me, or some impulse deep inside of me, to do so.

  “So, what is it?” Dr. Timberland asked me as he entered his office backwards.

  “Go ahead, please,” I offered the other girls; my generosity was only in appearance; inside, I was worried about my own share.

  When they solicited the date of the midterm examination, the maximum days of absence allowed before failing, and where assignments could be left should they ever miss class, one cannot imagine my relief. Dr. Timberland’s answers were, the eighth, three, and a nod at the flap in his door.

  With prolonged gazes from one to the other, they confirmed their mutual opinion of him and took their leave. I could not help but smile, squeeze my breasts together with the sides of my arms until they kissed and stir my hips around idly.

  “And you?” He purposely avoided looking at my body, directing his fugitive eyes to his office walls which were covered with landscape wallpaper. A forest, lush, shiny and green, opened up around us, and a gentle waterfall remained suspended in time.

  Without a word, I left my vanilla bean on his desk and walked slowly, silently away. It is better to be mysterious than awkward in such situations. Appetites are as much to be enjoyed as cooking and cleaning.

  CHAPTER 18

  Dr. Timberland lived in Manatee Haven, the largest mobile home park in the area. From the college, you could get there in fifteen minutes by foot as they advertised, but you’d have to sweat. He did as he stamped down his feet one after the other in his buckled shoes along the sidewalks, brief-case swinging high, its weight pulling him along an extra few inches every other step; only an occasional lizard hindered his otherwise regular footfalls and made him release a pent-up sigh; his suit betrayed his gauntness, flapping in the breeze as if it weren’t on a body but hanging on its own on a clothes-line.

  Manatee Haven was flat as a board, tidy, green, with white mobile homes; each one had their storybook tree, a driveway with their number written on it, 1481, 1482, 1483, a square of grass, a fake grass doormat with a plastic daisy, a peep-hole. It looked like something you would have played with for hours when you were a child.

  Dr. Timberland had a black and white cat named Chess who waited behind the kitchen window for Dr. Timberland to come home without moving, like a ceramic ornament. When Dr. Timberland called him, he forced his head and front paws out of the window, and pulled the rest of himself out with difficulty; the window was open just enough so he could manage doing so without skinning his back. Dr. Timberland picked the cat up by the hind legs and walked him around like a wheelbarrow. They did this every night, and every night when the cat got tired of it, he attacked one of Dr. Timberland’s gaunt ankles. It was just a game, after which Dr. Timberland read the newspaper and the cat cuddled up on the discarded pages and was covered with the leisure section.

  Before dusk, Dr. Timberland turned on a jet sprinkler to water his square of grass, and sometimes in the manoeuvre to keep the jet perfectly within the boundaries, wet himself. In the evening, he went to check his mail in the clubhouse and dispose of his garbage. Otherwise he stayed at home and, from what I could see, did nothing in particular besides mark papers and watch television. I know all this because I’d been following him around for over a week.

  Actually, there were a few things I found unusual, going through his garbage. He went through quantities of chicken broth cubes, maybe ten cubes per day. This tortured my imagination. Everyday I found a gardenia browning at the petals. And almost daily I found an empty bottle of medication for a Miss Paulina Craft, sleeping pills, diverse painkillers. Her name wasn’t on his mailbox, neither was “Mr. and Mrs. Timberland”. Could “Miss Paulina Craft” be the maiden name of his wife? Was he the one taking her pills? Or was he just throwing the bottles out one by one? Because she’d left him? Was he a widower? I didn’t understand. Besides that, he was a normal bachelor.

  It was late afternoon. The sun cast a yellow light over the mobile home park. Dr. Timberland was lowering a tin awning, noisy as thunder, over a window that was never lit. I hadn’t even begun to approach him, when an insurmountable fear, the kind that slithers up behind you at the onset of dusk, attacked me in broad daylight. My heart beat fast and hard, as if I were about to die.

  I’d been brewing him too long in my mind, twisting and turning him, sampling him until he’d taken on unrealistic proportions: the finest, rarest bit, the only portion that could bring me my every happiness. I didn’t know yet how self-defeating a one-track hunger could be. Craving for strawberries, one forgets raspberries and blackberries.

  I sat down behind someone’s tool-shed. A lizard eyed me suspiciously from it. I waited until Dr. Timberland cut a gardenia and sunk his nose into it.

  “Dr. Timberland?”

  If he looked up with a pleasant enough smile, exposing his infantile teeth, his face fell unsympathetically as soon as he recognized me; maybe he had been expecting someone else, Miss Paulina Craft to come home; maybe it had to do with the dress I was wearing; it was too short. I had told myself I was overdoing it when I’d bought it from the second-hand store, but I thought he’d like it because it was made out of a synthetic stuff, the fur of an animal that didn’t really exist. I had blackened the contours of my eyes, grown my fingernails to twice their original length, covered them with three coats of red varnish, shaved the hairs off my legs for the first time, just for him. I was so nervous, I held myself as if I were cold, which was unlikely in my attire; I felt my face sweating; the pressure of my arms against my sides made my breasts swell out of the furry V-neck, but even this didn’t appetize him; he glanced down at them with distaste. I was losing all my self-confidence. I could hardly speak. I should never have trusted my voice, it had all the nervousness of premeditation trying to sound spontaneous.

  “I’m in your class. Do you remember?”

  I knew he knew very well, but he wasn’t saying a word, just staring at me in disbelief.

  “May I have a minute with you?”

  “My minutes, and hours are posted on my office door.”

  “Yes, of course, why don’t I see you then?”

  He picked up his garden shears and walked away.

  “You don’t happen to know where the clubhouse is, do you??”

  He pointed without looking back once, a nonchalant flick of his shears. Even if I did live there, he didn’t care! My face reddened, burnt. The ignominy! Curtailed hunger, unrequited appetite! I ran home, back to my own company, and cried until my make-up left a ghostly portrait of myself on my pillow. Then I ate everything sweet I could find, four cans of peaches, and a box of white sugar, cube by cube. When I was done, I was hungrier than ever.

  CHAPTER 19

  Professor Ranji returned to class with a limp not worthy of his yellow jogging attire. His face had a chalky complexion and underneath his eyes, were night blue semicircles. His eyes were covered with that glossy film that is often the result of medication or fever. As he spoke, he never allowed his eyes to focus quite on me, concentrating to look just inches in front of my forehead. I crossed my legs. Black stockings do not go nicely with red pumps, I thought to myself, pulling out the wrinkles around my ankles.

  Professor Ranji’s hands trembled as he walked up and down the rows, holding up a wide-mouthed jar for us all to see. It contained a translucent, offensive smelling liquid and one hemisphere of the human brain, separated from its partner like a grapefruit slice.

  When Professor Ranji pointed to the area of motor cortex which commanded the muscles of the lips, tongue and jaw, his eyes at last met mine; not to greet them, but to burn them with his hatred.
I must say that if I understood correctly, we do not really taste with our tongues. Our tongues are but civil servants who carry taste up a well-defined path, to the viscous ruler above, the brain, which determines its pleasure or disdain.

  It was a curious moment in my life. I felt as though something was shifting inside me, a tide reversing prematurely. I do believe, though it may sound queer at first, that it was responsibility shifting from the low rank organs of execution to my brain. Yes, how curious, the area I’d considered the most moral of myself all those years, in all its scruples and accusations, was the very source of pleasure all the while, a masochistic mass battling against itself.

  I couldn’t wait for class to finish, and bobbed my knee up and down. As soon as Professor Ranji gave us leave, I rushed out of the Scott’s Science building; my heels sank into the grass, stabbing the earth again and again. If I ran fast enough, I could catch Dr. Timberland as he arrived on campus, brief-case swinging high, jacket flapping in the air.

  “Hey! I want a word with you!” Professor Ranji was unable to run properly; one leg almost ran, and the other one trailed behind, looking stiff in his jogging pants, as if it had been taken off and put back on the wrong way. I recognized his Hindu cologne that had once enthralled me before he limped up to me, too close for my taste.

  “I’m in a hurry. I have Honors Calculus in ten minutes.”

  “You did it on purpose, didn’t you? The whole thing was premeditated, wasn’t it?! You don’t have to admit it to any goddamned juvenile court, but you’re going to have to admit it to me!”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He shook me by my dress; synthetic hairs floated away, lightly, carelessly.