The Changeling

by Joy Williams

  Yet how could he do any of these things? He was a civilized and realistic man. Until Shelly had entered his life and fixed him with her thirsty raven’s maw, his days had been calm and ordered. He was at home in a world which he had made temperate by the sheer conviction of his personality. His ability to make others feel anxious, uncomfortable and ignorant confirmed the personal peace he felt which he considered unshatterable. He rose at seven, worked with weights, ate cold cereal and brushed his teeth with powders and strings. He took no salt or stimulants. He played tennis. He could converse on almost any topic. He had not traveled much but he had read extensively. At night his principal pleasure was to clamp earphones on his head and listen to Landowska.

  Now he felt ruined. His mind was filled with dire and successful acts. He had exquisite visions of fucking Shelly’s ass until it split like a peach.

  Of course he was appalled at himself. At the university, his work began to slide. The numbers, the formulas he had loved for their beauty and worth deceived him. They caused him errors. They clumped across the blackboard like cows. He began to stammer. He said giddy things. He found his fly open. He took to staring at his students while they stared, baffled, back, and before his very eyes one day, a boy’s head grew flat and slick and formed two ponds complete with ducks. Raised hands were cleavers for dividing him. A girl’s mouth became a mare’s wide and plushy slit.

  Perhaps it was the weather. Perhaps Shelly was poisoning him in some way. Lincoln’s heart pounded. His saliva tasted queer in his mouth. His tongue grew odors. He grew weak, sobbed daily, craved small comforts like a child. As he walked across the campus in the spring, his shoes black with the melting ground, Shelly would drift beside him like a fog, sickening his bones. He did not speak to her. He did not respond to her except in sleep, and then he woke up screaming, drenched in semen, dreaming it was blood. She was a witch, a poison woman, with weapons hidden inside her body. She was a bitch with a belly of ice to which his tongue stuck as though to freezing iron.

  He feared sleeping. Even so, it seemed he dreamed while awake. It was spring. Small yellow flies hovered around his head. He walked and walked, trying to stay awake. It was a sunny town. Windows were draped in orange plastic to protect their items from the sun. Children ran before him laughing, their heads bleached out, holding dripping things to eat.

  “Lincoln, sweetheart,” Shelly said, “if you’d just come along with me, and be my husband and give me my family, you’d just be fine. You’re just making yourself sick, sweetheart.”

  Lincoln stared at her aghast.

  Lights burned day and night in his apartment and he took his rest sitting upright in a chair to avoid nightmares. The veins in his arms were discolored and his chest, his breathing, felt queerly light. What was the brine they’d packed the poet Byron in?

  “I’m just loving you is all, Lincoln,” Shelly said.

  He feigned unconsciousness.

  She fixed herself on his lap. She socketed his cock inside her with a sigh, and began to rock. In moments he had come. His shanks and hers were white. But he was still fixed fast. She rocked and rocked. She hugged him like clothing. The garment of Deianeira grafted to his skin. She put one little finger in his ass, one little finger in the corner of his mouth and her tongue in his ear. Her black rough hair fell against his nostrils and his eyes. All passages were blocked. He gasped, he choked, with effort he slipped free.

  He wept with tiredness. He shook. He wanted a cup of milk. He wanted some clever conversation. He wanted to clamp his earphones on and hear the music of the spheres.

  “I’m just a man,” he said desperately, “and there’s hardly anything left of me.” He coughed. There seemed to be marbles sliding around in his chest. The apartment was a fetid cave. The breeze blowing through it seemed used up as though it had been blowing for years, over all continents and conditions of men, yet was still full of unpleasant surprises.

  Lincoln returned to his chair and sat there unshaven, his jaw slack. His hair, which had once been so carefully groomed, was twisted in knots from Shelly’s constant plucking at it. The chair contained his sweaty image. He fit it to a tee. A greasy imprint of buttocks, head and hands.

  “You’re the most nervous person I know,” Shelly said from the bed, “but you’re still the only one for me.”

  He looked at her, panting lightly. How had he come to this? A respectable man of forty. An effective, moderate and civilized man, never given to excesses. He could deduce nothing from this experience, this pursuit, this mauling except that he had been driven into hell. As an intelligent man, of course, he knew that there was neither heaven nor hell after death. So he was still, undoubtedly, numbered among the living. He was not dead, yet he felt pain and indignation as though his self were a dwelling that had been broken into and robbed. And rearranged. Which was worse.

  He was not dead but he was cut off from life and health and ordinary pleasures. And all this by this girl, this cunt, this witch that rode his penis like a broomstick.

  “Your love is a flogging,” he said as calmly as he was able. A drop of spittle dangled from his chin. “It is a chamber of horrors. If you loved me, if you had any capacity at all for love, you’d see I was miserable, sick, perhaps even dying and you would go away.”

  “Oh, sweetheart,” Shelly said, “we can’t part now. You’re about to be a daddy in a month or so.”

  “A daddy,” he repeated, grinning like a skull.

  “Yes, yes,” she laughed. She bounced from the bed and ran into the bathroom. Her stomach did look slightly distended as though she’d just had a feed. When she returned, she was fully dressed. She had brushed her hair and tied it back with one of Lincoln’s ascots.

  “That is impossible,” he said, still grinning.

  “Oh sweetheart,” Shelly said. “I’ve been faithful to you. As you know, I’ve scarcely spent a second from your side.”

  “I’m sterile,” he said. “Sterile as a stick.”

  “Now that’s just not true,” she said. “You’ve already started a lovely big baby.”

  “You’re a simpleton,” Lincoln said. “You are ignorant of medical fact. I have no sperm. Or rather, there are spermatozoa but they are immature. They lack mobility.”

  “Is that right?” Shelly murmured. She was making the bed and tidying up the apartment, something Lincoln had never seen her do before. He looked at her warily.

  “After the baby’s born, we’ll go to my home,” Shelly said. “You’ll like it there. It has a pool and a tennis court.”

  Lincoln pointed a trembling finger at her belly. “Whatever you’re breeding in there has nothing to do with me! You are a carnal, careless woman. Many of your men friends on campus could have made that, but I did not.”

  “You’re making such a fuss over one little sperm, Lincoln. It’s not like you to be so misguided. It just takes one determined little sperm.”

  “I do not have determined little sperm,” he said. “It’s a sign of high I.Q.” He chuckled weakly. An educated member! The things it wouldn’t do . . .

  “Imagine the journey, Lincoln,” She said. She clasped her hands together fishlike and swam through the air. “The dangers. The attrition.”

  “Attrition!” Lincoln said, surprised.

  “A woman’s greatest secret is her emptiness, as you know, Lincoln, but in that emptiness is the shadow. Out of millions, thousands reach the gate but then only one is chosen by the shadow. And then the way is closed.”

  “Perhaps it’s a cold,” Lincoln said. “Or sometimes cancer will bloat a woman.”

  “. . . the way is closed. The barricades go up. The other hopefuls hesitate and die.” Shelly folded her hands on her stomach.

  “It’s just fucking,” Lincoln said. “And then it’s enzymatic action.”

  “The precise nature of the blocks remains unknown. But one enters. It is only one which is acceptable to the surface of the emptiness. If others entered, life would not occur. Something else would occur.”
r />   Lincoln looked at her feverishly. His face was burning, his eyes were burning. Polyspermy. Is that what she was referring to? Nonviable. Such a muddle-headed girl. Tells the truth but wrongly. Making fancies out of fact. Her mind, a snare. But polyspermy! She had the gist of it. With it, reproduction of a species would not occur sexually. His sterility was not nothing then? Reversibility proves validity? Not nothing, the absence? His mind recoiled, then pitched forward.

  “. . . the child begins,” Shelly was saying. “At first it resembles a signet ring.”

  “There is no child,” he said desperately.

  “Babies come because it’s their time to come.”

  “I have no more interest in straightening out your confusions. I take no responsibility for your condition. I am not the father.”

  With effort he rose from the chair. He did not know his purpose in doing this, but it seemed necessary that he rouse himself. Leaning his forehead on the wall, he pulled on a pair of trousers. They hung loosely on his hips. He was surprised at his thinness. He felt there was no more to him than the heaviness of his breath. Perhaps a lung had collapsed. He should get to the hospital, call a cab, get to the hospital, cancel the lease on the apartment, get some rest, allow no visitors.

  “I need something to eat,” he said. “Please fix me something to eat.” He went into the kitchen. The cupboards were bare. Nevertheless, there was a bad smell. He opened the refrigerator.

  “The milk’s soured,” he said. “Everything’s wrong. I used to have proper meals. You’ve ruined my life. When did I last eat?”

  Was it summer? Was it spring?

  He fell straight forward on the floor, fracturing his nose and knocking himself out.

  Lincoln spent six weeks in the hospital. Bed to bath and back again. Serenity. Juices. Pressed sheets. There was no word from Shelly. The doctors came by each afternoon at four except on Sundays when a clergyman appeared. The clergy spoke of odds and pieces and read the news aloud as though Lincoln, in his disorder, had been struck blind. The clergy was jolly and cursed a lot.

  “There’s a chicle shortage,” he said, “and now they’re putting plastic in our gum.” He shuffled the pages. “Do you chew? Not you? . . . Well, in Portugal, a woman confessed to murdering twenty-six people over a period of ten years. In Florida, a man was arrested for surf-casting for sharks off a bathing beach.” He shook his freckled head and swore. “I’ve always admired those fish myself,” he said. “They don’t lie sleepless in the dark and weep for their wickedness. There’s a moral beauty there.”

  Lincoln agreed to just about everything. He felt in a holiday mood. What difference did words make anyway? Or one’s behavior in the world? His scornfulness left him. He had been sick, the victim of chills and fantasies, and now his only ambition was to get well. He had no plans and was reluctant to leave the hospital but one could not be the guest of pneumonia forever. He had a little money. He would travel someplace. He would tutor. He would live a modest life, generous to himself. A chop at eight. And in their seasons, artichokes and oysters. A paperback collection. Perhaps on Sunday, a drive to some scenic overlook. He couldn’t think of what to do actually. He felt a little worn. A loaf of bread slightly sampled. The life that was left to him taking the curve of Shelly’s mouth. The life that was gone the shape of her hunger as well. His cock stood up beneath the sheets, inappropriate to his attitudes.

  The clergyman’s freckled skull shone through his thinning hair. What was it that happened to redheads when they died? Unlucky. Became beetles. Even so, the man loved his jokes. He rolled back his jaws with laughing but didn’t make a sound. The lions didn’t eat Daniel because they didn’t know how good he was. Ha. There was no money in the chaplaincy. He wasn’t a bad sort. At night he guarded bridges for the state, a way of keeping body and soul together. He spent a lot of time with Lincoln because, as he told him, Lincoln was basically a healthy man. The terminal cases made him nervous. Caused his nose to run.

  Lincoln had no other visitors. Shelly never arrived. He kept expecting to see her at the door, hysterical, overweight and overwrought, demanding money and marriage. This would have given him cause for righteous scorn. He felt that if he could see her one more time he could excise her from his life and mind forever. Her absence, however, exerted a very strong influence. Face to face he could banish her. But she did not present herself. When he’d fuck her bottom, had it been her face he’d seen? He was puzzled, then annoyed. Then he grew concerned. He felt his emotions manipulated, as though he were following steps in a manual. Nevertheless, she could be dead, in his apartment, right at that moment, and he would be responsible. Lying, leaking, as potatoes do when gone, with a terrible smell. Shelly dead, behind a locked door, with the lease paid in full for a year. For that was the sort of man that Lincoln had been. Solvent. A wonderful risk.

  And now he was responsible.

  For signs of omission as well as emission. Ha.

  He requested tests to be run on his ability to father children. “I have been falsely accused,” he told the doctor. A nurse arrived and milked him briskly for a sample, and the next morning he was taken to a small office to hear the results. There was a diagram of the prostate on one wall. On the other was a colored photograph of a covered bridge in Vermont. Lincoln sat in a very uncomfortable vinyl chair to which the backs of his legs periodically stuck.

  “I want the results of this for the courts if necessary,” Lincoln said to the doctor.

  “Very well,” she said, “but the answers are all on the palm of your hand.”

  Lincoln looked quickly at his hands. Did she think he fiddled with himself? Had something taken root? Bulbs? Or was there a sign, easily read, on the flesh of the barren men? A broken circle, proved perhaps by science?

  His hands were slim and rather ruddy.

  “Look here,” the doctor said, pointing to the wrinkles encircling the very tops of his wrist. “These lines. They’re called bracelets. When they go up in a curve, right into the heel of your hand, they indicate, oh shall we say, reproductive problems. But that’s not your case at all. Your bracelets don’t enter the palm.”

  Lincoln looked at her dumbfounded. The hospital was supposed to have the finest minds and research facilities in the Northeast. Yesterday, his semen was whipped around in a twentieth-century centrifuge, and today he was victim to this stupid dialogue. There was several million dollars worth of laboratory equipment here and he was trying to keep up his end of a conversation with a shaman.

  “What sort of a professional are you, for godssakes?” Lincoln said.

  “Oh, reading palms is just a hobby. Life lines, love lines, Mars and Fate lines. It’s astonishing how it all proves out. Were you aware that nothing is more clearly indicated in the palm than insanity? But I just dabble in this for the relaxation. It’s like reading mysteries. I just offer this to you for what it’s worth.”

  “Well it’s certainly not worth much,” Lincoln said moodily.

  “Here we go then,” the doctor said, and slid out an eight-by-ten photograph from a filing drawer. “This is a scanning electron micrograph. It’s been enlarged some four thousand diameters.”

  Lincoln looked. It seemed a picture taken from a planetarium. Flashy rockets with fat whip tales against a black backdrop of sky. There were a considerable number of them.

  “The sperm is removed from the semen by centrifugation and shadowed with platinum.” The doctor pointed with a scrubbed nail to the slightly conical, cottony head of one of the things in the photograph. “The sperm head consists of densely packed chromatin, the hereditary material, covered by the acrosomal cap covering the enzymes that accomplish the penetration of the egg. Behind the head is a short segment containing mitochondria that supply energy to power the long flagellum.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Lincoln said.

  “I have no reason for deceiving you,” the doctor said.

  “This is a joke!”

  The doctor laughed.

  “Shit,”
Lincoln had said.

  When he had been released and gone back to his apartment, Shelly was there waiting for him with a little bundle of meanness. There didn’t seem much he could do about it. He was a man without a future. He had come to the island then and here he had stayed.

  •

  In the sauna, Lincoln’s cock slipped shriveled from his hand. Thinking about Shelly always depressed him. He wasn’t concentrating. He began to pull angrily but then settled down to caring for himself as only he knew how. He pulled and stroked it, pinched it dearly, snuggled and slapped it, made it sway like a snake, charmed. He had a pleasurable ripple of anticipation. He arched his body just a little bit, slowing it down.

  Who was the Nazi who bit the jugular of the boys he buggered?

  Who was Tiresias that he was so lucky?

  Lincoln’s tongue clicked against his teeth.

  Really, man cannot bear too much reality. And if man cannot, then what can but the insensate? Best to forget the past. There aren’t the words for half of what goes on in this life. And where’s the life gone that’s lost in the living, as the poet asks . . . Shoot your wad at that . . .

  His stomach bloated. He pounded his cock against it, against his belly puffed out with fancies and ultimate dreads. He grazed the side of his cock with one finger and rolled it lightly around the strained foreskin. His breast heaved. He bucked. A spume of come struck him lightly in the face.

  Lincoln lay panting, his eyes shut. He felt a disemboweled and sacrificial thing, on a mountaintop near the sun, in the days when the belly’s pleasure fed the soul.

  He groaned. His eyes rolled and then focused as he pulled himself up to a sitting position. His heart pounded in his fatty chest. He could hear the slight hiss of steam in the room.

  He lowered himself to the floor and stepped into the shower stall, turning on the water full force. He felt vague shocks rippling across his back and down his arms. He leaned against the wooden, curtainless cubicle. His heart sounded like the banging of some enormous, malfunctioning engine. The water moved sluggishly down the drain. He turned off the water abruptly and reached for a towel. His clothes were folded neatly on a bench. He dried himself and reached for his Jockey shorts. He heard a sound at the back of his head and slipped awkwardly on the wet floor at the sound, dragging his clothes with him. His skin tingled. His mouth formed the names of his children. The names were on his lips like bubbles of spit. One stone settled against another in the grate . . .