The Fable of Bing

by Tim Sandlin

  “Would consummation with no emotional attachment constitute a negative outcome?”

  “Sex is only mutually pleasing when it happens between two people who are in love.”

  The receptionist on her hands and knees groping under the desk snorts. Neither Rosemary nor Bing realizes the snort is meant for them.

  Bing says, “I do not fathom love.”

  “How is it you know constitute and exhibited outward signals of aggressive behavior, but not love?”

  “I know only words Dr. Lori spoke?”

  “And God. You don’t fathom God either. You know all this biological gobbledygook but not love or God.”

  “Gobbledygook?”

  Rosemary holds the door open for Bing. “The more I hear about Dr. Lori the less I like her.”

  53

  Bing walks out of the TV station directly into a melee. Right off, a kid in his late teens, maybe twenty — clunky glasses, shoes, and belt buckle — falls to his knees in Bing’s path.

  “Father, forgive me, for I have sinned.”

  Black guy — skinny as a fence post in a black velour jogging suit — cries out. “I sinned more than he has. Forgive me.”

  A third grade literary arts teacher from Mission Bay shouts, “I have early onset Alzheimer’s. You are my only hope.”

  A full tilt cacophony of begging for forgiveness, miracles, and money bursts forth. Bing stops short; Rosemary walks into his back side.

  She says, “Shit.”

  Bing says, “Why now?”

  “I don’t mean shit literally. It’s a word people say when they’ve faced with unexpected crap.”

  “Crap?”

  An older man who hasn’t shaved in a week walks toward Bing, hands extended, Ping Pong ball eyes aimed at the sky. “Help me, prophet. Restore my sight.” His hands clutch at Bing’s face, which makes Bing go bonobo defensive — teeth bared, throat growling. The rest of the crowd sees the old blind man fondling Bing and they want a piece of him also.

  Rosemary shouts, “Leave him alone.”

  Fat chance of that. There must be twenty of them, all desperate for what they think Bing can do. The litanies of pain and humiliation are too much even for Rosemary. Bing appears to have frozen up. Arms reach for him, grabbing, pushing. Men weep. Women mumble. The kid on his knees will soon be crushed.

  Bing emits an ear splitter of a shriek that brings the mob to silence. Rosemary, who was next to him, fighting to protect him, takes a direct hit to the eardrum. In the white whine of after noise, she hears Bing speak.

  “I am invisible!”

  The kid on his knees says, “I can see you, master.”

  “No, you can’t.” Bing turns to the blind guy with his hands out. “Can you see me?”

  “No, sir, I cannot.”

  “That proves it. I’m not present.” The crowd backs off a step, understandably confused. Bing goes on. “I want all of you to accept that I am not visible even if you think you see the real me. You are seeing my shadow, not me, and my shadow cannot perform your tasks.”

  This draws a few disgruntled mutters but for the most part this crowd lacks cynicism. If a man tells them he is invisible, it must be true.

  “I need you to act as if the real me went away a few minutes ago. You do not know where I am.

  The black guy says, “Where are you then?”

  “Somewhere else.”

  Rosemary says, “This won’t work.”

  Bing doesn’t answer Rosemary. He continues to speak to his followers. “I am going to leave now, with my friend, and you will ask yourselves where I have gone. That is my wish.”

  “Your wish is my divine order,” says the kneeling clunky kid.

  “Not my divine order,” says the blind man.

  “You cannot see me,” Bing repeats. He motions for Rosemary to follow him and they pass through the crowd and on across the street toward her car.

  54

  Rosemary says, “Why leave? Why not heal the whole bunch, one at a time?”

  Bing seems distracted. All that touching from strangers has thrown him off balance, as if he actually is his own shadow. “They would not have reached satisfaction.”

  “I think the Alzheimer’s woman would have been plenty satisfied with a good healing.”

  “Even if I grant them what they asked for, I can’t give them want they want.”

  Rosemary stares into her Acai Super Antioxidant smoothie. Smoothies aren’t meant for looking into and thinking things through like coffee, green tea, or all forms of alcohol. Smoothie contemplation takes place on the surface. “I like you better when you’re eating bugs. The glowing love from your followers thing gives me the willies.”

  Bing slurps his smoothie — a Mega Mango. He also has a plate of limes on the side. They are in Jamba Juice, after leaving the TV station and the confusion of the street. Rosemary didn’t want to go home quite yet, but she didn’t want a bar or café either. Her needs were specific. Bright light, pastel colors. Cleanliness. Short of a Laundromat she knew about in Torrey Pines, Jamba Juice was the one place to fit the bill.

  “I have heard young ones say love,” Bing says, “In the animal park.”

  “So you do know what it means.”

  “They say it at the beginning of a longer word — loveyou.”

  “I love you?”

  Bing shakes his head. “When they speak on their phones and they want to do something else. They say loveyou.” Bing says it flat, quick with no inflection or emotion. “It means they want to stop using the phone. Loveyou means goodbye.”

  “Love you doesn’t mean goodbye,” she says. “That’s just what kids say to dismiss their parents. I love you means almost the opposite of goodbye.”

  “Hello?”

  “More like let’s be together.”

  Rosemary and Bing are the only customers sitting at the round, high tables. A jogger had come in for a shot of wheat grass, but he did his business and left. Otherwise, it is Rosemary and Bing and the staff who doesn’t have any interest in Rosemary and Bing at 10:30 on a Monday morning.

  “Love is when two people care deeply about what happens to each other,” Rosemary says.

  “Like you and Sarah or me and Betty.”

  The new name causes Rosemary a jolt of alarm. She didn’t know of another woman in Bing’s life. “Who is Betty?”

  “My mother. She’s a bonobo, not my birth mother. She protects me.”

  “Oh.” Rosemary reaches across to wipe a smoothie mustache from Bing’s upper lip. He lets her.

  She says, “Those are family love, which is the most important kind, but we’re talking about romantic love. That’s when you care about someone you aren’t related to, so there’s no logical reason for caring. You just do. You want to touch them all over all the time.”

  Bing bites a lime in half, thinking about being touched all over. It might not be so bad if the toucher was Rosemary.

  Rosemary says, “Romantic love is when the other person’s happiness is more important than your own.”

  Bing inspects the remaining lime half. He turns it in his fingertips, admiring the shine on the flesh. “I care about what happens to you more than I can about what happens to me.”

  “No shit?” Rosemary studies Bing’s face. She searches his eyes for the hidden meaning. People don’t say stuff like that without hidden meanings, not in her life, but one thing Rosemary likes best about Bing is the lack of disguised motives. He means the words he says. A boy raised by apes does not have an innate sense of irony. That strikes Rosemary as an amazing scientific discovery.

  Bing says, “I care about you, personally. Not just as the pretty girl with nice hair who took me from the zoo. I cared about you from the minute I saw you burn the letter.”

  “You were there?”

  Bing nods.

  The letter was from her mother at the religious group farm in Denmark. Rosemary would rather not think about her mother, just now, so when Bing doesn’t push for an explanation, s
he doesn’t give one.

  Instead, Rosemary says, “Me too. I care about you, Bing. I don’t want you to be unhappy.”

  “Is that the same as wanting me to be happy?”

  Rosemary thinks, then she decides. “That is what I want.”

  Bing swallows. His Adam’s apple visibly rises up, then down. “Love is us. You and me.”

  Rosemary stares at Bing a long while. He tries to stare back but can’t match her intensity. He wants to. Since leaving the zoo he has discovered humans put emphasis on the mutual line of sight. They take it as an outward sign of something inside that matters.

  To Bing, Rosemary’s mind seems to be whirring. He imagines he can hear it going round and round, although there’s a chance he might be hearing a refrigeration unit back where the juices are made.

  Finally, Rosemary says, “Like us.”

  55

  Rosemary pulls the Jetta up against the curb on the Monday side of the street, which is the side opposite her place. The Jetta is black; the curb is concrete. The sky, as usual in the San Diego metroplex, is off-blue.

  She gets out, locks her door, and walks across the street toward her small home house before she realizes Bing isn’t at her side. Bing is still in the car. She goes back and opens the passenger door to find Bing bent forward peering into glove compartment.

  She says, “Bing?”

  He says, “What?”

  “That’s what I was going to say. What?”

  Bing looks from the glove compartment to her. “This cave is different now that we are love.”

  She looks past him into the glove box. Looks the same to her. “How so?”

  “Whatever I see has changed. Things I knew what they were, I don’t know anymore.”

  Rosemary studies Bing. He seems dead serious. “Don’t analyze the deal to death, Bing. Time to go inside.”

  “That’s proper.”

  He gets out and they cross the street, holding hands. Bing has never walked, holding hands with the fingers intertwined before. It’s different from when she led him out of the zoo, grasping his hand by the palm. He isn’t certain of the significance. There must be significance. What he can tell is that it feels okay.

  At the front door, Rosemary releases his hand to fish for her key. She sticks the key in the lock and says, “Are you ready, Bing?”

  “Yes, I am ready,” he says. Then, “What am I ready for?”

  “To go inside.”

  “Okay. I am ready to go inside.”

  Inside, Rosemary crosses to the kitchen bar to drop her keys into a small ceramic bowl kept there for the very reason of holding keys. She kicks off her sandals.

  Bing stands just inside the doorway, watching.

  Rosemary walks back to him, drapes her arms across his shoulders, and pulls him into a kiss.

  Bing is floored. He’s seen couples press their faces together at the zoo, sometimes for as long as they could possibly hold breath in their lungs, although usually it’s shorter. He’s tried to imagine what they are doing and how it feels, but the reality is nothing of a sort what he imagined. He imagined pushing his mouth against a slightly bald tire hanging in the enclosure. Rosemary’s lips are different. Soft and firm at the same time. They taste Tic Tac sweet. They seem to pull him in to her, not as if swallowing him or even sucking his face into hers, but more of a melting into one another sensation. She absorbs him.

  That’s when Rosemary puts her tongue into play.

  Bing is lost, nauseous, elated, tingly, afire, and coming out of his skin, more or less in that order. After what feels like a week but probably is only a half minute, Rosemary draws her face back away from Bing. Her green eyes cast a challenge straight into his.

  Bing says, “I do not know what is expected.”

  Rosemary cups his face in her hands. “This is the part where we copulate.”

  56

  First, a scuttling sound, like mice in the trash, or as if paper bags are brushing together. Then a coo followed by air movement in, then out of lungs under stress. The coo volume increases, more guttural as it passes from mouth to throat to chest to gut and on below.

  An odor wafts. Sweat in a dry sauna, only sweeter, as if someone has thrown sage on the heating element. Not an unpleasant smell or even a strong smell. In light we might not even be aware of it, but in darkness when senses expand we smell this sagey sweet sweat.

  The coos rise to glottal grunts. Speak the word — glottal. These are not grunts picked up in urban decay but sub-Saharan sounds and below the jungle snorts we hear gasping, holding-onto-yourself breathing, and a rhythmical whisper of Yes, yes, then again yes.

  The air pulses and blows like a fan set on High, but this is no fan only a clapping. The sound of one hand clapping. A squeal. Loud. Insistent. The squeal grows and grows and grows layered over a howl building up and up until the darkness is torn by an all-out SCREAM OF RELEASE.

  Darkness again. Silence, only now we think we can make out a hiss of exhalation followed by inhalation.

  Then, Rosemary: “Bing.”

  More silence.

  “Bing? Are you there?”

  57

  Fireworks and a national holiday would have been appropriate in light of the way Bing feels, but there are no fireworks. No day off with pay for a grateful nation. Instead, Bing has triggered a worldwide internet frenzy. For centuries mankind has searched for proof of the impossible and here it is — presto — on YouTube for all to see and marvel at.

  Of course, a sizeable portion of the population doesn’t believe. They claim fakery or scientific explanation. The cynics stew in the juices of denial. Conversely, the believers believe too well. If Bing can heal, he must know secrets. He must be wise. He must be able to heal anyone. He is the genie. He is Lord.

  Bing isn’t aware of any of this. All he knows is he and Rosemary copulated and it was fine.

  Friday finds him in Turk’s mammoth office where Rosemary dropped him off while she works in her cubicle down the hall. She said Turk wanted to get to know Bing, but, so far, Turk has been on the land line telephone while Bing plays a game on an iPad connected to a flat screen TV wide as Rosemary’s bed.

  Bing is playing a game Rosemary found on Nick.com. The game is an electronic version of what used to be called paper dolls. A bald girl in her underwear stands on the screen while the game player mix and matches from a near-endless supply of hair colors and styles, clothes, shoes, accessories, the works.

  Bing loves it. He gives the girl short black hair with long earrings, then long straight hair parted in the middle around cat eye glasses. He tries a two-piece bathing suit followed by a ski bunny outfit. Then he moves on to nail polish.

  Turk idly watches Bing play as he gives someone on the other end of his phone grief. “We don’t perform miracles for under ten million, plus agent fees, plus lawyer. Non-negotiable. Bottom line. End of day.”

  Turk’s feet are propped on an aircraft carrier of a desk. Besides the desk, three chairs — one behind the desk and two facing it — and the flat screen TV, there is also a high tech espresso machine from Italy and a freestanding mirror from Turk’s grandfather who financed Centered Soul Network.

  Turk studies Bing while Bing giggles to himself. It’s hard to call Bing anything but smug.

  Turk says, “If I didn’t know you, Bing, old sport, I’d say you’re getting laid.”

  Bing glances from his game to Turk and grins. Laid, in this context, is beyond him.

  “I just got off with Oxygen. They want you on a reality series.”

  Bing returns to the game. He’s on shoes — cowboy boots, ballet slippers, he can’t find jellies.

  “There’s this show where they find some poor out-of-work loser with autistic kids and a wife in a wheelchair and they build him a house. As if that will make it all better.”

  “I have no need for a house,” Bing says.

  Turk rises and walks to the tinted glass wall. He looks down on the gathered mass of sick and searching people who wai
t for Bing to save them. A few have sleeping bags. One guy is selling Bing Bonobo t-shirts.

  “Oxygen wants to run through four sob stories and the home audience votes on which one you should heal. You cure the most pitiful contestant and the others get lovely parting gifts.”

  Bing settles on slightly used penny-colored hair, somewhat long. “When I help someone, it does not always help.”

  “I doubt that. You wouldn’t have tried to save the gangbanger if there’d been much chance of failure. His home boys or whatever they’re calling themselves these days would have carved you into strips.”

  Bing shrugs. He chooses green eyes.

  Turk says, “Anyway, no one would believe Oxygen didn’t rig the deal. For a real miracle to convince, it can’t be done in the studio.”

  Bing goes back to shirts and skirts. Whatever Turk is talking about is outside of food or Rosemary, so he is not interested enough to follow it closely. Turk leaves the window and comes over to stand behind Bing where he can see both Bing’s thumbs on the iPad and the paper doll on the flat screen.

  “Bing, son, the time has come for another miracle. Your hits are flagging. We need something big and public. Something that can’t possibly be faked.”

  Bing tilts his head so he’s looking up and back at Turk. His primary view is of nostrils. “Why call me son? Are you my father?”

  Turk hasn’t thought along those lines, but it can’t hurt. “I am your spiritual father. You are the new Messiah and I guide you by word and deed. You may call me Father if you wish.”

  Bing sighs. He doesn’t know exactly what spiritual means, although he’s closer than he was a week ago, but he does know spiritual father isn’t the same as father.

  “I would enjoy knowing my father.”

  “That’s me,” Turk says. “And I’m the man to make you famous beyond your wildest dreams.”

  “I do not dream of famous.”

  Turk frowns. This isn’t within the norms of his value system. “Everyone wants to be famous. You were in that zoo too long. You got your values turned upside down.”