Primordial Soup Page 11

  “What are you, some sort of witch? A Medusa?!” Veins rose out of his moist forehead. He had a plaster on the vein one draws bloods from, surrounded by the usual spectrum of a healing bruise.

  “Without oxygen, your blood is blue,” I commented and began to walk.

  “What the hell did you do with it?!” Panting obstinately, he struggled to keep up with me; every few feet, he scratched the same impolite part of himself. I noticed that the puma on his sweatshirt had a loose, hanging gold bead eye.

  “I beg your pardon? With what?”

  “The piece I’m missing! You know damn well!”

  My hand covered my mouth instinctively, as though I were protecting myself from repossession of what was duly mine.

  “You ate it? I can’t believe it! You ate it? I knew it. You ate it??” Professor Ranji squatted against a banyan tree and buried his face in his palms.

  “Does she know?”

  “Who?”

  “You know damn well who! Was she behind the curtain, whispering stage directions to you?”

  “By she, I assume you mean your wife, rather than your mother or daughter?”

  “Tell me it was an accident, your elbow accidentally hit the knob, you didn’t know what you were doing, you’re very sorry, it was an accident, something, but don’t stand there looking at me like I’m the freak!”

  I didn’t know if it would be suitable to weep like the heroine in a three-decker novel or to run.

  “If you wish to alleviate your guilt for having merged your flesh with flesh other than your wife, confession is on Sunday,” I reminded him.

  The face Professor Ranji made was so sincerely void of understanding, I conceived my mistake.

  “Will, how you feeling?”

  I was startled to discover Dr. Timberland standing behind me. My body tingled all over. I now knew it was just my brain having fun, tossing electricity here and there like grains to hungry chickens.

  “Hello Stan,” murmured Professor Ranji.

  Dr. Timberland gave his glasses a few puffs and wiped them on his jacket.

  “You all right? I heard you were ill?”

  “I’m fine, just fine, much better, this is nothing …” Professor Ranji confessed acidly. He started to peel the plaster off his arm, but halfway through changed his mind, and patted it back down uneasily.

  “I see Miss Lester is one of your prize students, too?” Professor Ranji looked me up and down, then back to Dr. Timberland with eyes full of warning.

  Dr. Timberland was disconcerted. He glanced at me from the corners of his eyes, and thought I didn’t see him press his thin lips together to suppress a laugh. I lifted the silver chain out from between my breasts and nibbled on the tiny Christ.

  “Why don’t you both come for breakfast? Tomorrow is Saturday, there are no classes. Oh, do come??”

  “No, but thank you anyway,” refused Professor Ranji politely, “I shall have breakfast with my wife and children. How ’bout stopping over, Stan?”

  “Is your wife’s cooking so great?” I challenged.

  Professor Ranji excused himself, lowered his head and dragged his heels to his dusty jeep. When he stepped inside, he did so slowly, straining his face. Before he drove past us, he gave Dr. Timberland another warning stare and uttered, “Bon appétit.”

  “What was that supposed to mean?” Dr. Timberland asked me irritably, fanning the dust that had risen to his face.

  CHAPTER 20

  Hunger kept me from sleeping that night. It started out as the hunger that calls one to the refrigerator in the middle of the night, then it grew, it attacked my guts, my sanity. I felt the cross on my breast, a tiny spot of cold. I kicked off my blanket, pulled my dress up over my legs, stepped into my red shoes.

  An occasional owl looked down at me from the electricity lines with wide eyes. The streetlights were my only friends, helping me feel I had a right to be out, sentinels whose job it was to help me along the way. I walked on the side of the road without looking at the stars. I knew where I was going.

  My feet left prints on the ground, the great island of the heel, the strait to the archipelago. How big they had grown, the feet with which I trod the earth, without my noticing. My footsteps led to a particular mobile home in a particular mobile home park, in front of which was a particular square of grass.

  The sun rose over the earth’s edge like a Cyclops’ eye, a red spot gazing down at me. I stared into it. The red eye heated my tissues, flowed in my body like red wine. The window was open. I only opened it wider, inch by inch, and slid myself inside, head first. I found myself in a dim, narrow kitchen which smelt of cat litter, medication, old people and urine. I landed on a glass bowl of lukewarm water. The cat rubbed itself apologetically against my leg until I went to pet it, and it unexpectedly attacked my fur dress. I stood up in haste, knocking a few bouillon cubes off the plywood board that served as a worktop and was coming loose at the wall.

  I only had to cross a room to get to the bedroom. It was small, dim, and smelt of sleep, stale and faintly sulphurous. Dr. Timberland was sleeping soundly, a sleep without the sound of breathing. I recognized the bottle of sleeping pills on a wobbly round table next to him. The sticker read Miss Paulina Craft. There was only one long oval pill left, half white, half red. I pulled the blinds up a bit to see better, and slowly lowered his sheets.

  Naked, he was as I had imagined. Besides a tuft of fine golden hairs in the vicinity of his pinkish meats, his skin didn’t have a single hair. I could smell the spiciness of his deodorant, and his breath, which was like Japanese broth. His chest is what entranced me. His skin had never seen the sun, and to my joy, had all the whiteness of cooked egg white. His two breasts were like sunny side up eggs, only the yolks, like the sun’s eye, were blood red. I turned my head aside and red egg yolks gambolled under my glance. I closed my eyes and they appeared against the soft screens of my lids. Dr. Timberland, how deeply he slept, unaware of the air that moved in and out of him, strangely ignorant of his own heart, meticulous, succulent offal. His eyes, shut, were like ravioli, his eyeballs, bumps of ricotta and ground meat, his lids, coats of pasta.

  I slipped back into the kitchen and found a stale loaf of bread out of which I cut five pointed fingers. I found a stick of butter in the old refrigerator (there was practically nothing else besides) and buttered the bread fingers. Three small bottles of spices, white and black pepper, and paprika, stood next to a single hob. I sprinkled paprika over the butter as if I were painting my nails, pushing the cat away with my foot. With five fingers in one hand and a knife in the other, I kneeled beside Dr. Timberland. How both red yolks went up and down with his every breath, as if they were floating on water, the waves moving them gently up and down with the same secret life that animates every ocean tide. With a stroke of the knife, I severed the finest of Dr. Timberland’s red skins, keeping me from the tender liquids of his aureole.

  Dr. Timberland did not cry. He sat up, looked upon his bleeding breast, and did not move. The red sap seeped down his bony torso, made red canals out of the furrows between his ribs. My mouths drooled all the more. My impatience could stall no longer. I dipped a bread finger into the red aureole and devoured it savagely.

  Dr. Timberland, witnessing my act, returned promptly to his sleep before he had even resumed his horizontal position. His head struck the iron bars at the head of his bed with a solemn chime, after which he did not notice, or care, that his neck was crooked, nor that his head was caught sideways between two of the bars. I dipped the remaining bread fingers deeper into the wound.

  The bathroom smelt of towels that were never dried properly. The bathtub, I noticed, was sandy at the bottom. I didn’t mind. I turned the hot water tap on as far as it would go. The water gushed out, hot and steamy. It was all so exciting. I ran to the kitchen for the bouillon cubes, as many as I could hold, peeled them with joy, and threw them in. I rushed back for a ladle. The bouillon cubes softened, leaving a greasy film on the surface. Chicken soup, I chuckled
to myself, mother of life. I ground more cubes with my fingers, observing the water as it turned from lemon yellow to a deeper ochre.

  I dragged Dr. Timberland by the ankles. He slid easily inside, into the initial womb of life. I helped him sink lower; he floated to the top; only his head weighed him down, rolled uselessly along the bottom. With my fingernails, I scraped the dead skin off his back, enough to make a bland tasting terrine. Twice, Dr. Timberland attempted to sit up, and twice I was forced to submerge him.

  In the broth, his skin adopted a yellowish hue like boiled chicken. I turned the cold water tap on so it would trickle down his feet. The effect I sought was obtained, chicken skin. I remained on my knees, spinning the liquid round and round with the ladle. His member rotated. I scooped it up. On the ladle, the chicken neck twitched from side to side, as beheaded fowl necks are known to do. I seized it, stretched it as long as it would go, tugged and twisted, yet it would not break; on the contrary, each time I let go, it shrank back into the pouch of skin holding the two gourmet lumps, constricting into a more stingy tidbit.

  At last, my hunger was fulfilled with a final animalistic spasm; as promptly, my stomach was saturated not with fulfilment but regret. My face reddened in shame as I contemplated the limp form that had caused my countenance to undergo such wild perturbation. Dr. Timberland looked dead floating on his side, and the chicken fat around him had hardened into a greasy yellow crust. Though he was easy game, I was no detrivore. I resented his passivity and banged his head against the bathtub for it.

  My hunger abated, Dr. Timberland’s home regained the familiar features of any home. At such an untimely moment, one can imagine how startled I was to hear the phlegmatic coughing fit of an elderly person. I could not tell if it was coming from an old lady or an old man; all I knew was it came from the other side of the house. I detected the muffled steps of slippers. Someone was moving towards me.

  I hid behind an armchair. An elderly woman with white, thinning hair emerged in an ochre-stained bathrobe down to her ankles, and white gym socks up to her bony knees. She had Dr. Timberland’s fleshless lips, faded bleached blue eyes, milk white skin and frail build. She could not walk without holding onto the wall with one hand, and onto her forehead with the other.

  “Stanley? Stanley?” Her voice was weak and needy.

  The remorse I felt sharpened, gave me sharp pains in my guts. What could I say or do? I ran out, holding my own head with both hands. I didn’t close the door or look back.

  Night fell, and the impulsive cries of birds and babies were replaced by the snickering of crickets. My hair clung to my neck, as did my hair dress to my body. I could go no further. I wandered into the garden of a hotel and dropped into the first lawn chair.

  When I awoke, the sun was teasing me through the branches of the coconut trees. A taste of decomposing eggs was in my mouth. Like a black flower, flies were clustered upon it.

  I expected the congregation to condemn me when I entered the church. I was handed a book of hymns and allowed into a pew, but it did not take long for my neighbours’ vexation to appear. Each leaned as far away from me as balance permitted, some finding it impossible to stay in the same row. The woman closest to me brought a handkerchief to her nose. Just as onions, garlic, and alcohol cause one to smell abominably the next day, so does gluttony.

  I hoped the Eucharist would take away my sins, yet when the moment came, the sliver of Christ’s body evaporated on contact with my tongue. I requested a second helping, but was pushed along. Our Saviour continued to bleed on the cross, I heard the blood dripping, drop by drop onto the floor. Jesus was Jewish, I thought to myself, wondering, out of the blue, if His bleeding on the cross had made His meat kosher, wondering if His meat had a sell-by date, wondering if He, in a way, put an Egyptian mummy to shame, all He had to wear for eternity was a loincloth. I rushed out of the church before I could think any more such nonsense.

  My feet were bleeding, throbbing in my red pumps; the heels were worn down by running. Dirty, sweating, I was starting to feel like an animal in my hair dress; it was sticking to me like my own skin and the mass of woolly hairs were turning into mine.

  Dr. Timberland’s front door was unlocked, his window still open, his square of grass still there, serene, tidy, welcoming, as it had always been. For a few moments, I did not breathe. My legs transported me to the bedroom, and the bathroom where it had all happened.

  It was as though someone had returned in my absence and the blood that had wet the sheets had been cooked to a welldone brown. The water in the bathtub was cold, and the tint had changed, like the clear water one leaves overnight in a burnt pot.

  I looked under Dr. Timberland’s bed, lest he, like a dying creature, had sought refuge there. Something stuck to my palm, a flattened raisin. It was not a raisin at all, but Dr. Timberland’s dehydrated aureole. I did not know what to do with the wrinkled speck. It repulsed me to have it pasted on my palm. I shook my hand, but it wouldn’t fall off. I attempted to flick it away, but the aureole was a malediction, for whichever of my fingers I used for the purpose, it simply stuck to that one’s cuticle. Desperately, I wedged it between the iron bars of his bed and the wall, but knowing it was there bothered me. I took it between my teeth, and appropriated it with little satisfaction.

  For the first time, I noticed that one of Dr. Timberland’s walls was covered with the same landscape wallpaper he had in his office. The pines stood silently, the light shone endlessly, the waterfall was suspended in midair.

  The bedroom on the other side of the house was barely bigger than the unmade bed that occupied it, a sulking pile of open bathrobes, knit shawls and quilts. I lifted them up one after the other and shook them, but the old lady, to my disappointment, was nowhere to be found. Old age and sickness left a smell similar to when one opens a dirty dishwasher in the summertime to find room for a last spoon or glass. A reserve of pill bottles kept guard on the barricaded windowsill; I brought a handful of them to the light; all of them were the prescribed medication of Miss Paulina Craft. About a hundred small pictures had been pasted on the wall, mostly of a young skinny boy in glasses and two pretty young women with long, ringlets and bright, all-believing eyes. There it was again, change, that restless drop of water. Not only the contents of the pictures had changed, but the pictures themselves were arching, bending, preparing to flake off the wall.

  The kitchen hadn’t moved since I last saw it. Only the cat was still there, and for some reason, had not used its litter box the past few days. When I stepped around one of its unclean doings, it rounded its back, backed up under the worktop, and spat at me.

  I removed Dr. Timberland’s stained sheets and packed them tightly, along with the pillows and mattress protection, into the oven. The bare mattress was also spotted. I longed for cleanliness. I stabbed the mattress and ripped off the coarse, sky-blue material. White feathers twirled up to greet me.

  CHAPTER 21

  When I finally made it back home after three days of wandering and fasting, I was surprised to find how many dirty dishes I’d left around, leaning against the windows and walls, plates with splotches of past meals. I had no time to lose. I mopped the floor. In the kitchen, something smelly caught my attention, drawing me reluctantly to the garbage bin, where I stood without the courage to open its omnivorous mouth. When I pressed my foot down, the cantaloupe halves from the evening with Professor Ranji were staring up at me, swarming with hundreds of maggots.

  I ran to my bedroom and thrust back the sheets. The dry, withered rump roast lay there like a baby which had never grown in size, though had wrinkled with old age. I lifted it by the string and fed it to the garbage disposal. I poured whisky and dropped flaming matches down the drain. I scrubbed the hob until it gleamed. I tore open my mattress. I thought everything was ready and I could finally take a shower and change, when I saw Professor Ranji’s footprints on the walls. With a feather-duster, I removed them one by one until I came to Stag Head and, in dusting him, the feathers became tangl
ed in the antlers.

  The doorbell rang. I was suddenly overtaken by an uncontrollable anger.

  He handed me a particularly cheap brand of white wine I used for cooking, and stepped inside before I had freed the passage.

  “Oh, you really shouldn’t have!”

  “Huh?”

  Had I not held out my hand, he would not have returned my key to me. I could tell he was too embarrassed to look at me.

  “What is that smell on your neck?!”

  “Old Spice,” he shrugged.

  “Remove it!” I ordered, pointing to the bathroom.

  He scrutinized me before giving in. When he returned, he smelt the same and I had not heard the water run.

  “What’re all these darn feathers?” He kicked one weightless pile, then another.

  “Angel down.”

  His manners were drying my palate.

  “You ask too many questions!” I had felt another was in the air.

  “Then why don’t I just leave?” He looked me up and down.

  “You must take off all your clothes! You must do as I say!”

  “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

  He undid the buttons of his polyester shirt (whatever buttons weren’t already open) before their threads burst from his stomach’s pressure. Underneath, he was wearing the same tank top he had on at the corner store. He kicked off his cowboy boots next to my ballet slippers. They were crass next to the fragile pink. Their tips curled upwards and the sole detached to give them the subtle smile of a satyr. His socks didn’t match, but he kept them on. His white kangaroo underwear might have proved sufficient with a little imagination, but I wasn’t inspired.

  “I have prepared this for you.” I folded a white bath towel diagonally, and set it on the floor.

  “What the heck’s that for?”

  “Sit on it and don’t ask questions. Take that off! Bare, I said!” I had to concentrate to keep my voice at the highest volume before a command becomes a yell.