Jennie wasn’t the kind to sit up and wait—at least she never had been before. Their relationship had never been exclusive; that had never been part of the rules. Yet he kept thinking of her sitting up all night, and maybe, just maybe waiting up for him. And he hated himself for that as well.
Suddenly he felt starved. He went to the refrigerator and jerked the door open, the bottles and jars inside rubbing against each other musically. He reached for the quart bottle of orange juice.
When he started to open it he noticed that the lid wasn’t on securely. He held the bottle up to the light from the narrow, curtainless kitchen window. As he turned it slowly he detected the faint impression of a lip print near the rim. She was just like a kid. More and more. He felt a sudden flash of anger, and poured out all the juice, discarded the bottle in the can under the sink. At first she’d been so careful, sterilizing her silverware, her cups and plates, making sure he didn’t handle anything she’d had in her mouth. Like she was dirty.
They hadn’t made love in some time. He couldn’t even remember the last time they’d kissed.
Now he was ashamed of himself, looking at the discarded juice bottle. You can’t catch it that way. He’d told all their friends that, his family who thought he should have nothing more to do with her. But he was scared. He knew better, but he was scared of Jennie.
And yet if he could love her illness away, kiss and rub it away, he would do it.
“I heard something.” The voice behind him was so weak he hardly recognized it. “I didn’t know you were home.”
He turned around. She had the comforter wrapped tightly around her. The narrow muscles in her cheeks and throat trembled. He tried to smile at her, but couldn’t quite get the idea up to his lips. “You should be in bed,” he said. “You’ll get cold.”
“I’m always cold,” she snapped.
“I know, Jennie.” He went to her and put his arms around her. “I know.” He squeezed her. After a moment’s hesitation she squeezed back, or at least what passed as a squeeze for her.
“Hold me in bed?” she whispered.
“I’ll hold you in bed,” he said softly, leading her into the other room. “I’ll hold you as long as you want. Forever if you want.”
After an hour or so she was asleep again. Gene lay with her, massaging her back gently with his hands, feeling the lines of every muscle, every bone. And then the phone rang.
“Are you coming over?” He could hear Ruth’s voice, and static, and wind.
“I was just there,” he said quietly, watching Jennie stir in her sleep.
“But are you coming over? I need you to come over.” Ruth’s voice was steady, focused, obsessive.
“Ruth …
“I need you.”
He’d chased Ruth all through college. Every once in a while he would stop, and think how ridiculous he looked, what a fool he was, but those pauses for self-examination had been few and far between. She’d had the voice he heard in his dreams, gestures he could mimic in his sleep, skin that had felt like no other. He’d never wanted to think about whether his feelings for her were real, or whether this was truly a balanced, healthy relationship. Those questions simply had not applied. There had been nothing real about her, and he hadn’t cared if there was a balance—he’d felt deliriously unbalanced. He’d simply had to have her.
He’d met her the first day of classes. The friend of a friend of a friend, although he could no longer remember which ones. He’d been introduced as a “math wizard.”
“Then you’ll have to tutor me sometime,” she had said, with this simply amazing smile. And he had. If she’d asked him to, he’d have done all her work for her. There had never been “magic” before; now there was a magic he could not let go.
“I need you,” she’d said, but it had meant something different back then. She’d needed his help with school, and she’d needed him to tell her how beautiful she was—so that she could be convinced that someone else might find her attractive. Even when she’d made love to him, it was to convince her that someone else—and that someone else seemed to change depending on her mood—would want to make love with her.
“You make me feel good,” she’d say. “You make me feel alive.” But she had never asked how she made him feel.
She should have asked. Because sometimes she had made him feel less than alive. He’d shied away from any other relationship, just in hope that she would be the one. He hadn’t kept up his friendships. He’d convinced himself that his life would not work without her in it. He’d convinced himself that his relationship with her was a crucial turning point in his life, and that this was a relationship he dared not fail. Every woman he had met resembled her in some way. She’d become the measure for every female gesture, glance, or expression.
“Kiss me, Gene. There and there and there. Am I still beautiful?” He could hear noises in other parts of the house:
Ruth’s companions and their lovers.
“Yes,” he said, with his lips urging her skin toward some vague warmth. “You’ve always been beautiful.” He ran his fingers through her hair, and felt them go deep, too deep, into the dark waves that surrounded her depthless eyes, her pale, night-surrounding mouth.
“Good. That’s good, Gene,” Ruth whispered, holding him tighter and tighter within the scissors her body made. He wondered what she could possibly be thinking. It scared him that he could not even guess what she was thinking.
But then he’d never been able to guess what she was thinking. Even as she’d died, the thing that had haunted him the most was trying to figure out what she was thinking.
He’d been walking on the quadrangle at the center of campus. It had been a bright, sunny day, bright enough to burn away the haze that had accumulated the previous week. Both a haze of weather and the haze that had built up in his mind after several weeks of an unusually frenetic and unproductive pursuit of Ruth. In fact, the contrast had bothered him. The sunlight had felt just too bright, the campus setting too stark, too livid.
Suddenly there was a crash, screams. A large crowd had gathered near the stone wall that bordered South Drive. When he got there he saw a red Ford that had come up onto the sidewalk and knocked a third of the wall down.
He’d pushed his way through the crowd. Several people had been huddled over a woman on the sidewalk. Gene could see the long cuts on her legs, the nylons scraped away, the real skin scraped away below that, the shards of glass in her sides.
Then someone had shifted and Gene could see that it was Ruth lying on the sidewalk, that it was Ruth who had contained so much blood. Somehow he got through the crowd. He had said things, terrible and inarticulate things, but he could no longer remember what they were. And then it was he huddled over Ruth, the mask of her face in his hands and staring up at him, and it was a mask because the back of her head was gone, sprayed in carnival colors across the granite and marble of the rough wall.
But Gene had kept talking to her, holding the ruin of her head in his hands and sweet-talking her, kissing her open eyes and kissing her lips, passionately kissing her lips with tongue and tooth and caress as if to arouse her, and then desperately rubbing at her breasts, even as her broken ribs caught on his shaking hands. Sweet-talking her, kissing and rubbing her, as if he were loving her awake after a long night asleep in his arms.
When they finally pulled him away from her Gene screamed as if they were taking him apart. But Gene could not remember that scream. What he would remember instead, and so vividly, was that sudden fantasy he’d had that his kisses had been working, that Ruth’s eyes had just begun to focus.
“Gene?” And it had remained a fantasy until the evening she’d first called. “Could you come over?” Until she needed him to tell her how beautiful she was once again. “I need you, Gene.” Until she needed him to put his hands, once again, into the thick waves of her dark hair. And to feel his fingers go too deeply through the hair into the space where the back of her skull should have been. Until she needed him
to tell her she was still alive.
“There, there. I think I felt something. I’m sure I felt something.” In desperate need to make her feel, he had bitten her left breast as hard as he could. It was like putting his teeth into leather. And still no blood would well, no bruise would form. “Don’t leave now, Gene. So close. I could almost feel.”
Passing the bedroom doors of Ruth’s companions, he could hear their lovers softly weeping.
He’d decided that night that he would leave the phone off the hook. He’d prepare dinner, the biggest meal Jennie had had in some time if he had to cook all night. But he ended up spending more than an hour in the meat department of their local grocer, and still he wasn’t able to choose anything. The chicken looked too pale, bloodless, as if it had all been dead too long. And you couldn’t eat anything dead so long, could you? He was sure it would have no taste, no color.
And all the cuts of beef and pork looked somehow unreal to him. Too much red. Too much blood. He could not believe anything dead could have that much color.
Only the fatty parts looked real. The smooth, too-soft curves and hills of fat.
He rubbed each cut of meat through its sheer plastic covering. He thought he was close to knowing what they wanted from him—he could see it in the way their color changed when he pressed his living fingers into the meat through the plastic. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to trust anything in that cold landscape of cut meats.
The lights were out in the apartment when he finally got back. Again, Jennie had left a mess, but he could hardly blame her for that. But she’d always been so orderly, almost obsessive about it, so he supposed this increasing laxness probably did not bode well.
“Jennie?” he whispered from the bedroom door. She said nothing, but the dim light that slipped beneath the bottom of the shade illuminated her head, the soft blonde curls, the face that looked even more beautiful to him the paler it became.
She slept so soundly. He knew she would be in no mood for a meal. He could feel tears on his cheeks, running into the corners of his mouth.
Quietly, he slipped out of his clothes and joined her under the covers. She did not stir, even when he pressed his cool body against her nakedness.
He began to kiss her, to taste her, and when she still did not respond he began to nip, to bite. He began to cry, massaging her breasts, probing her pubic area with his fingers, trying to kiss her, love her awake. But she remained cold and dry. The only air stirring in the room seemed to be his own, ragged breath.
Gene knocked on the dark screen door, and waited this time. This time, he knew, required a more definite invitation.
Her pale face appeared in the screen, her dark eyes taking in the bundle by his feet: the dull green blanket, the soft blonde hair that still trapped the light, the pale skin with its tinge of silver.
“Is there room?” Gene whispered. “Room for her?”
Again Ruth looked at the bundle. Then her eyes floated up to hold him. “You’ll still come? You’ll be there when I call?”
Gene pulled his jacket closer, unable to keep warm. “Yes,” he said finally. “I’ll be there when you call.”
The screen door opened without sound, and the women inside the dark house dragged the bundle across the threshold.
It was two weeks before the next phone call. But he was there to pick up the receiver on the first ring.
“Hello,” he said.
“Gene?” Jennie’s voice said. “Are you coming over? I need you, Gene. I need you to come over.”
THE VISIBLE MAN
He had always suspected that there was something wrong about that mysterious region which lay inside him, bounded precariously by his skin. He sometimes wondered if his distant ancestors had understood their bodies better than he did, back when mystery and some god’s whisperings in the skull were constant companions.
As a child he hadn’t believed in a heart, liver or lungs, or intestine, whether large or small. He became convinced that the models of the “visible man” he saw at school were of some fantasy figure, like Robin Hood or Huckleberry Finn or GI Joe. In the family encyclopedia there were transparencies—they called them “trans-vision”—which showed these imaginary insides one layer at a time, but he believed they were just mildly interesting, colorful works of art, with no relation to the real world at all.
When he saw animals in the road, split open by the impact with some truck or car, he couldn’t explain the soft things inside them, but he always suspected it was some sort of taxidermist’s trick. Either that, or animals were even more different from human beings than he had thought.
He never had his own solution to the problem of human life and locomotion. He believed in blood—he’d scraped and cut himself enough times that the existence of blood had to be a given. But he didn’t connect it with the other pink and red things human beings supposedly had inside them. He perceived blood as being some very pure, exotic form of oil. He knew there was something mechanical, machine-like, about the way people moved, although he really couldn’t imagine gears or pumps inside. He also knew there was something electrical about it all, but wires and switches and outlets didn’t come to mind.
“Spiritual electricity” was a phrase he thought of in his later high school years and in college. Then he would imagine the body as some great bag filled with a blinding, spiritual light, which gave you movement and personality and told you what words to say. Through a process similar to osmosis, invisible roots attached to the organs and limbs grew down into the well of spiritual light and electricity for nourishment. Food and water and air fed the light, which the light burned into waste. Age or disease or miscellaneous sudden or prolonged traumas would dim the light. If the light grew dim enough, you died. Once he believed in the existence of this reservoir of light, he came to see the flesh as merely a vegetable sort of thing, which grew and developed and fruited because of the nourishing light.
So the human body was a spiritual thing and a vegetable thing, not an animal thing at all.
He believed in these theories for a very long time, and these beliefs never seemed to affect his health. In fact, he was healthier than most people he knew of his age and background. It wasn’t until he grew old, and his health began to fail him, that his body seemed to turn against him and he had to reconsider the theories he’d lived under most of his life.
The rebellion began simply, with an incident concerning an early morning pain. He woke early one morning with a huge pain that filled his chest. He found breathing difficult, but it might have been his panic which made it difficult for him to breathe. “What if it’s your heart?” his wife asked him. Obviously, his own panic had transferred to her. He shook his head dumbly. He didn’t even believe in a heart. Nor did he believe in the nonsense that you could locate feelings in some bloody lump of meat. Feelings run through the body like electricity, he wanted to tell her, but the words wouldn’t come. Panic had overcome his spiritual reservoir.
His wife called her brother, and between the two of them they were able to load him into the car and rush him to the hospital. During the trip he clutched his chest and shook his head. He felt as if he had suddenly been dropped into the middle of someone’s fairy tale. The pain increased as the car rocked over the uneven pavement. He could feel a random series of short circuits taking place throughout the reservoir of his spiritual electricity.
At the hospital they took an EKG. He stared at the machine with superstitious awe. They told him that his heart—the heart he knew to be nonexistent—was perfectly fine. The problem, they said, was a little excess acid in his stomach—another organ he knew to be a myth. The doctor showed him a chart much like the transparencies he had once viewed as a child. Only this chart was a bit more stylized, and reminded him of Egyptian hieroglyphics. The doctor pointed to a spot where the so-called esophagus was believed to join the mysterious stomach. Here, or so the doctor claimed, he had lost “tone.” When he lay down at night, the doctor said, excess stomach acid was working its
way up into the esophagus. Regular doses of antacid were believed to cure the malady.
He smiled at the doctor and nodded passively, much as he would respond to some lunatic on the street speaking of flying saucers and little aliens. On the way home his wife insisted on stopping at a drug store, where she bought three large bottles of chalky, mint-flavored liquid. When they got home he took two tablespoonfuls just to please her. He could only hope that this substance would not neutralize his spiritual electricity.
After a day or so he stopped taking the liquid, pouring a little bit down the drain each night as he knew his wife was checking the fullness of the bottles. His abdomen and chest began to hurt again, but he bore it stoically and told his wife nothing.
A week later, his body declared a full-scale war.
His wife was out of town visiting her sister and he took that opportunity to spend hours sitting nude before the full-length bedroom mirror, meditating on the state of his spiritual reservoir. He was still experiencing these mysterious pains—in fact they had spread—and he decided the only possible way to cure them was to get in touch with his inner spirituality and permit its power to mend his vegetative form. A more specific plan seemed impossible—the inner workings of human beings were obviously beyond the power of human beings themselves to understand.
He was in perhaps his fourth hour of such meditations when he felt a tingling in his chest. He looked down and saw that some sort of opening had occurred. He became very excited, expecting that any moment now he would get his first glimpse of the brilliant spiritual light within. Instead a long tube of flesh stretched itself out of the hole and turned up as if to look at him. Its mouth-like opening appeared raw and irritated. Suddenly a liquid gushed out of the tube, burning his face.
He began to howl rhythmically, as much from a kind of psychic shock as from actual physical pain. As if in response to this rhythm, his abdomen began to peel like a potato, layer after layer unwinding into huge fleshy curls of pink and yellow and white and red piling up beside him, their juices soaking into the carpet. He stared at them dumbly, wondering if he could get the carpet clean before his wife got back from her trip.
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