The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories Read online

  First Anchor Books Edition, March 2002

  Copyright © 2002 by Shelley Jackson

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jackson, Shelley.

  The melancholy of anatomy: stories / Shelley Jackson.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77393-7

  1. Body, Human—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3560.A2448 M45 2002

  813’.54—dc21

  2001055329

  Author photo © Sylvia Plachy

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1

  For Wesley

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  HEART

  Choleric EGG

  SPERM

  FOETUS

  Melancholic CANCER

  NERVE

  DILDO

  Phlegmatic PHLEGM

  HAIR

  SLEEP

  Sanguine BLOOD

  MILK

  FAT

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  HEART

  There are hearts bigger than planets: black hearts that absorb light, hope, and dust particles, that eat comets and space probes. Motionless, sullen dirigibles, they hang in the empty space between galaxies. We can’t see them, but we know they’re there, fattening.

  They give off a kind of light, but it is a backwards light that races inward away from the onlooker to hide itself from view, so this light, whose color we would so much like to know (maybe it’s a color we haven’t seen before, for which we must sprout new eyes), looks more like darkness than any ordinary darkness, and seems to suck the sight from our eyes, and make itself visible in the form of a blind spot.

  Dark hearts, heavier than weight itself. Too heavy for reality to bear, they punch a hole in it, and sink through into the dream underneath. They throb dully at the bottom of a gravity well. We might sit by the side and drop a line, if we knew what kind of bait to use, but if we hooked the heart, could we lift it? And if the melancholy behemoth sounded of its own accord, bothered by our flies and sinkers, and we netted it, wouldn’t it collapse on the deck, exhausted by its own gravity?

  No, it is unkind to wrest these hearts out of hiding. Toss pennies in the hole, instead. Dump a martini off the poop of the spaceship, blow a kiss through a porthole and clear off, friend.

  The heart warps everything around it. Where nothing is, emptiness itself is twisted, its features distorted beyond all recognition. This is why people rail against the heart. It is bad enough to change everything that is, but when nothingness itself is altered, something must be done.

  If we hold ourselves still, at the moment the year turns over, we can feel a faint beat. That is the black heart continuing its patient, serious work. What work? I am trying to find out. I have given my life to observing the hearts. Observing, of course, is the wrong word for the patient cultivation of blind spots, for trying to understand, by the ways in which, yes, I do not understand, what the heart is. In this investigation, invisibility is evidence, blindness the closest I may come to insight, the particular shape and tenor of ignorance, a clue and a scripture. When I can no longer see anything, I will know I am face to faceless with the heart. What, I sit at my telescope, straining my neck, my fingers numb claws, in hopes of catching sight of nothing at all? Yes. I will know it when I don’t see it.

  Is it right to call by the same name the tiny, ruby red “hearts” children dig up in the garden? Those rubbery knots, the size of crab apples, that bounce so high but so erratically, shoot off in unexpected directions, are forever being fished from under sofas and on top of bookshelves? That let out a squeak when rubbed? It’s true that as they roll through the strict formations—parallel lines, rings, spirals—of children’s games they sometimes resemble gay little planets, comets, and asteroids. But where is the pity, the mystery in these toys?

  I do know of a rare game played in certain valleys in the Appalachians (its reach is tied to the vicissitudes of one or two family lines) in which one piece is chosen by lot as the Black Heart and plays a different role in the game than the others. As in other games, you must win as many hearts as you can. You must not take the Black Heart, however, or all the points you have won count against you. If you capture it by accident, you must try to force someone else to take it from you.

  There is one other strategy. If, at the end of the game, you have lost all your hearts, including your shooter, and hold only the Black Heart in your pot, you collect all the hearts everyone else has won. A dangerous way to win, to seek a perfect loss. I have come to look on this game as a parable, in which all the secrets of the Black Heart are revealed.

  EGG

  Part One

  My name is Imogen. I am thirty-six. I live in a pretty, disintegrating apartment on the Mission/Castro divide with my roommate, Cass, with whom I have, as they say, “a history.” I work in an upscale organic grocery store, where I restock toothpaste, candles, hand-carved wooden foot-rollers. I use Crest and buy candles cheap at Walgreens, but I like to look at the jewellike soap we sell, and the girls who finger it while gazing somewhere else entirely, as if waiting for a sign. I rarely speak to them. I’m not like them: they are sincere, optimistic, gentle. Sometimes they flirt with me, their open faces radiant and slightly spotty, their new piercings inflamed, but I have little will to carry things further. I have been “between” girlfriends for two years. I have my pride, and my disappointments. I’m not giving these details because I think they are interesting, but in order to mortify my own urge to simplify, to invent answers and then “find” them—like plucking an Easter egg out of the bush where I myself hid it an hour before.

  An Easter egg, how droll.

  READING NOTES, JUNE 14

  Nothing is more ordinary than the egg: its likeness appears in the painted hands of kings and saints, under the paws of stone lions, bouncing across ballfields. Yet nothing is more mysterious. People used to believe the toad lived far underground, encased in rock, and that inside the toad’s head was a lump of gold. That gold is the egg: locked, rumored, precious.

  I now look upon the day the egg arrived as the most unfortunate of my life. I did not see it this way at the time; then, the egg seemed like the culmination of a long, confused, but fairly steady progress, which required only that punctuation to make sense. Like everyone I knew, I had always thought I would do something more important later on. Now later on had come. How stupid I was!

  Had I been happy before then? I would scarcely have said so. I was restless and often embittered by this or that nuisance of my everyday life—my coworker Marty, the meter maid with a grudge against me, the band (Joss Stick) that practiced in the apartment beneath me, afternoons.

  Yet I think I was happy. The world seemed open at the edges, fenceless. I smiled, I complained, I ate a veggie burger, I was more or less what I seemed to be, and now I suspect this was happiness.

  Then the egg was lowered in front of me, like bait.

  READING NOTES, JUNE 17

  The egg eats. At least, it swallows things. You can watch them being expelled later. At first they are just shadows. Then they have color as well, and can be felt through the wall of the egg, like new teeth. Finally, only a tight skin like a balloon’s covers the object, now perfectly visible. This splits a
nd curls back, and the object falls outside the egg.

  These discards do not seem damaged, but they are. They are different afterwards, like food laid out for fairies: it’s still there in the morning, but no good to anyone. Berries are blanched, butter will not melt, fresh-baked bread has no smell.

  It was hot and the sidewalks were shifting nervously. I lay on my bed with the window open and a washcloth over my eyes; it was the first day of a long weekend, and I was spending it with a migraine. Cass was driving up to the Russian River. Until the last minute I had meant to go with her, but by then I could scarcely move my eyes and I gave up. All the incomplete and damaged ventures of my life came to mind one after another. The poem cycle I would never finish. A friend in Boulder I was supposed to visit two years ago, and never called when I changed my plans. Learning to play the guitar. That girl I flirted with at Joanie’s party, with the stupid name: Fury. I hid behind the natural sponges when she turned up at the store, but she saw me. That was the pattern: a moment of genuine interest, then a long, embarrassed retreat.

  Finally I masturbated. Then I fell asleep with my fingers still stiffly crooked inside my underwear and my head thrust back into the pillow as if someone had just punched me in the face.

  I woke up sweating, with the feeling I had just quit a dream of effortless energy, purpose, and interest—much more engaging than my real life. I kicked the covers off and fell back asleep. When I woke again I was damp and cold but my headache was better. It was raining.

  My washcloth was a hot, wet mass under my right shoulder. I dug it out and scrubbed my face with it. My left eye was itching. In the bathroom, leaning into the mirror, the sink’s edge cold against my stomach, I spread my eyelids to bare the eyeball and the lids’ scarlet inpockets. I spotted the irritant, a red dot smaller than a pinhead, lodged under my lower lid near the tear duct.

  I touched a twist of toilet paper to it, and the dot came away on the tip. I didn’t know it was an egg. I thought it was something to do with my migraine—now that I had passed the object, the pain was gone. I was so grateful!

  I dropped the twist in the toilet. If I had flushed, that would have been the end of the story, or at least of my part of it, but I did not. Some hours later, I hurried into the bathroom and peed without looking first. It was only when I stood and gave the bowl that respectful, melancholy look we give our rejectamenta that I saw the egg. It was the size of a Ping-Pong ball, and a shocking color against pee yellow.

  I fished it out of the toilet with my hand, proof I was a little rattled, because I am usually fastidious. (I could have used salad tongs.) I washed the egg and my hands. The egg bobbled around my fingers. I felt no distaste or uneasiness. In fact, I felt an eager interest and relief. “It’s an egg,” I said out loud.

  My first thought was that it was meant for Cass, not me. Cass would know what to do, she always did. She was at home being human. I was more like a bug in makeup: scratch the skin a little and you would uncover something black and chitinous, a bit of wing casing.

  My second thought was quick and spiteful; it was that Cass must not find out. Deep down I thought that it was right for me to have the egg, not Cass; Cass didn’t need it.

  READING NOTES, JUNE 18

  By some counts, hundreds, even thousands of humans have been swallowed by eggs. Many cases are poorly documented and we dare draw no conclusions from them. Some have acquired such a gloss of legend that it is difficult to sort out the fact from the fiction. But some are probably true. In a blizzard in the Himalayas in ’59, three novice climbers and a Sherpa guide survived by creeping into an egg. In 1972, one-year-old Bobby Coddle crossed the Pacific in an egg, bobbing on the swells, and was pulled aboard a Japanese fishing boat, where he was extracted, in the pink of health, cooing with happiness.

  I met Cass a long time ago, at college. It was the first week of freshman year, and our residential advisers had organized a square dance to help us all get acquainted. I was leaning on the fence watching and she came up and said, “I like you. You don’t bother with this crap. You’re like me.” It wasn’t true. I was wishing I weren’t so uptight, that I could whirl around with the others, but I just smiled, feeling myself become the kind of person who stood aloof, instead of the kind who was always left out.

  We became friends. I never knew why. I tried to please her, of course (everyone tried to please her), but I didn’t expect to succeed: I was too stiff, too dour, and too uncertain. Cass was the kind of person who always knew what other people were saying about things, and whether they were right or wrong. And yet she changed her mind a lot, and never seemed to remember that she used to hold the exact opposite opinion. But knowing this didn’t keep me from being ashamed when I got caught holding the wrong book, the wrong snack, the wrong shirt. “Do you like that?” she would say. Or, “You’re not going to wear that, are you?” I would drop the object in question as if it had caught fire in my hands. I was ashamed of this, too; it was another thing Cass would not have approved of.

  Cass discovered her lesbian tendencies after we graduated and immediately fell in love with the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, tall and stately, with long black hair and a fake ID (she was seventeen). I went out dancing with the two of them and got a migraine. Now Cass was seeing some guy with a goatee and I was the dyke, only I still hadn’t met anyone who could pass the final test: make me forget Cass. I loved her, in a deep, unpleasant way, but I kept out of her bed. I survived her shifting passions by never becoming the object of them.

  READING NOTES, JUNE 19

  The folklore of eggs is flush with lucky breaks, but there are darker stories of lost children, vanished lovers, and besotted girls wasting away beside them. Two-time Iditarod champ Cath Summers set her dogs on a rival who boasted about possessing an egg, with fatal consequences (ironically, it turned out the rival was lying; the egg belonged to a neighbor, grocer Mary Over). In recent years, Professor Bev Egan, noted scholar of fascist architecture, starved to death during a vigil in the Santa Cruz mountains during which, she told friends, she expected an egg to appear to her.

  I put the egg on a damp paper towel in the bottom of a mixing bowl and put the bowl under my bed, swathed in an old flannel shirt. By the time Cass came home the egg was as big as a baseball. I didn’t show it to her.

  It grew steadily. At one point I punched a small hole in it with a pencil and inserted a thermometer. The egg was almost body temperature. I would have liked to insert the thermometer into the very center, to see if the temperature was higher or lower there, but by then the egg was big enough that no ordinary thermometer would have reached so far. The hole I had made filled with fluid and shone like a tiny eye. The meat around it grew swollen; finally, it swelled enough to close over the hole. I tried other experiments: I swabbed a small area with rubbing alcohol—it seemed to contract; I rubbed salt on another spot—it shrank visibly and formed a shallow, wrinkled pit. I brushed it with oil—it glistened but did not otherwise alter; I spun it and it rotated as smoothly as a planet. I would have held a candle to it but that seemed barbarous. Nothing seemed to affect it much.

  After a few days, the egg began to give off a sweetly fetid smell. I heard Cass stamping around in the kitchen when she got back from work. Then she banged on the door. “Where are all these bugs coming from? Do you have fruit in your room, Im?”

  I said no. After a while she went away.

  That night I took the egg to bed with me. It was about the size of a bowling ball. Since it was moist, I swathed it in a T-shirt and put a towel down under the bottom sheet. Then I curled around the egg and took comfort in its warmth against my stomach, though it was not a cold night.

  In the middle of the night I awoke. My room seemed darker than usual. I realized that the egg had grown so big it blocked the light from the window. I could just make out its black curve against the ceiling. I was lying against it, almost under it, since as it grew it had overshadowed me. The shirt I had wrapped it in was in shreds around it. Maybe it was the so
und of cloth tearing that had woken me. Fluid slowly spilled over my thighs and between them, and I thought with prim displeasure that I had wet myself in my sleep. But no. The egg had wet me.

  I rolled from under it and spent the night on the sofa in the common room.

  READING NOTES, JUNE 22

  According to legend, the egg prevents canker sores and sudden falls, cures ringworm in horses, and kills mosquitoes. Whether or not these claims are true, the egg does bring undisputed benefits. Premature babies and patients recovering from surgery can often be coaxed to lick the egg for nourishment when they will take nothing else. Flesh wounds heal faster when bound against the egg, and in many hospital wards one may see patients in their white gowns splayed against the red orb in awkward attitudes, as if held there by gravity. They look like souls in the ecstasies of the last days; whether blessed or damned it is hard to say.

  When I awoke on the couch, Cass was standing over me, arms folded. “What’s going on, Imogen? You’re not acting normal. Are you on drugs?”

  I draped my blanket around me and shuffled toward my bedroom. Cass tried to pass me and I elbowed her back, but she got to my bedroom before me. She gasped out loud when she saw the egg.

  Cass and I carried it down the stairs and into our tiny back patio in a blanket sling. We cleared a spot for it and I draped the blanket over it so no one would see it. I thought someone might try to steal it. I woke up three times that night to look out the window, but everything was quiet.