Cartilage and Skin (4 page)

Even though this scum was the least incriminating trace of my case study, I became scared the instant I saw the residue: I had left myself vulnerable and exposed all night long. I went mad with panic. My heart leapt to life in my chest, as if it were a wild rodent suddenly tossed into a sack. However, while I was frantically scrubbing the sink, something peculiar happened to me. I seemed to step outside of myself for a moment and watch this tall, lanky man with pale arms, in his white tee-shirt and underwear, leaning into his sink. From this perspective, he looked absurd. What had made him so confused? What exactly had violated him to the breaking point? What had driven him to treat his own humanity as just a tangle of flayed skin that he used to cloak himself whenever he encountered another person? I began to see myself more clearly. The dark cloud of dread lifted a bit as a strange, new calm descended upon me. I understood that the most unsettling violation of my freedom was my fear that the authorities would never stop investigating and invading the life of their suspect, Parker the pervert. Yet where was my hiding place and from whom was I hiding? The spastic thing inside my chest began to settle down. I began to breathe again.
Where are your accusers now? Who condemns you?
I sensed that on this morning I had experienced my last bout with anxiety that I would have in my life. The demons had fled; the ugly swine had drowned themselves. Since puberty, I'd suffered random and unexplainable panic attacks. Then all at once, at my kitchen sink, something deep in my brain realigned, and I knew that the attacks were gone.

Nevertheless, I waited for the fiendish swine to return. I was dimly aware that my anticipation itself could have reopened the door and ushered the demons back in: Anticipation could have given way to brooding, and then brooding to repossession. Yet I was saved by another force, sort of distracted by a desire to revel in myself, to open up and unleash myself, but I couldn't decide what I wanted to do or how to go about doing it. Apparently, there were more demons inside of me than a phantom father and a hyper-refined sense of chastity.

After all, a person who lives in his mind has trouble living in his body. It becomes an absurdity to him because he doesn't know what to do with it. There is even the chance that it can become grotesque. He knows that it is located in the world, that it moves in time and space, and that it is, at least, a receptacle for his mind, to say nothing of his soul. The body is at the mercy of innumerable necessities, from water and food to atmospheric pressure and the exact degree of tilt to the earth's axis. The irony is that while the body is the most empirically known part of man—because it bruises easily, tastes fruit, and has orgasms—it is the lesser part. Given a universe of necessities, the body remains helplessly outside of a person's actual control. Perhaps it is for this reason that the collective unconscious of the human race has invented the soul—that part of us that slips beyond the reach of the world. We have no idea what a soul is or how it is contained in a body. This ignorance is essential because the moment we locate the soul is the moment we lose it, as well as our humanity. Like Diogenes the Cynic, we can take our business outside and crap in the street. All the old verities and truths of the heart won't even be around for “when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening,” because man will neither endure nor prevail; his insides—that which makes him man—have been sucked out and thrown away. Of course, if we are going to have a soul, why not say that it is made up of stuff that is impervious to the world, and while we are at it, why not add that its true home is beyond the world? In the meantime, we can abhor our bodies like good Neo-Platonists or squat like heavy rocks in a Giotto painting, as we wait to get to our eternal home, back to the real and true ground of our being. Or like good Americans, we can apprehend our souls just enough to give us a sense of hope and a cozy feeling in our hearts. Unfortunately, in this sense, those of us without a soul are homeless. At best, our body becomes a piece of equipment, and whatever we do with it has no consequence on any soul. After a while, we may wonder why do anything with the body at all, as all the delights of sensation begin to lose their thrill—why should a magician keep repeating the same old trick once it's been figured out? And it is a trick, isn't it, a gross trick played on us by nature, that we should be so dependent upon and mingled with such a helpless and futile thing as flesh? Once a person begins to retreat into his mind, he might find that it is a mansion with many rooms, and like any good homeowner, he will want to warm them all and turn on all the lights, one by one, until his mind has far outgrown the confines of his gelatinous brain and bony skull.

But there is something else he might find. Worse than the possibility that the content of his thoughts has no partner in reality, he might find that his mind is all potentiality, like a pantheistic deity. The normal mind is only aware of its trinity of subject, agent, and object, such as when a man says
I know myself
. This is obviously a little different from saying
I walk the dog
because in the former the self is divided into three parts: the subject
I
who has the power or agency to
know
the object
myself
. Of course, Saint Augustine used this minor trinity as an analogy of a Triune God, and the saint's presumption—once again, of course—was divine arrogance in microcosm. Following him, this spirit of confidence began to fester in the western world, and it spread into every appendage, until even the dirty, toothless peasant boys were professing that man was the center of the universe. It was a pandemic disease. The Cartesians, persisting under the same delusion, convinced themselves that
I think
was a sturdy foundation for certainty. We remained solid and certain for centuries, so we powdered our white wigs and swallowed the keys to the locked boxes of our maidens' crotches. That was all splendid until our arrogance slowly began to crumble, and the body—which had been suppressed by our arrogance—began to figure as the main factor in our thinking. But we weren't quite sure what to do with it. Diogenes re-lit his lantern. Philosophers started carrying hammers into the marketplace. The psychologists then came along with their scalpels and cut up the subject
I
into little bits, and they replaced the soul with a void. The first premise
I
—let alone the
know
and the
myself
—was all mutilated.

Now, we have the soulless man living in a fractured mind.

We can't ask the soulless man who he is, nor categorize him by characteristics and qualities. Once possibility becomes as real as actuality, man is nothing definite but everything potentially. In man, the order of being has been reserved. At one time, Aristotle would've had us think that prime matter was at the lowest echelon, as some type of gob without form, just waiting to be shaped—while at the highest echelon was the wholly actualized and definite, pondering its own perfection. But now, in man, the definite has become the limited, boxed in, and stifled, though still pondering itself under the delusion that it is a whole. Yet the soulless man is as polymorphic as prime matter; he is always becoming but never being, and though he is becoming, he becomes toward no end—

Or better yet, just forgive me now. Just ignore me. My god, my god, my god. Like any normal man, or even like a twelve-year-old boy, I should be able to speak clearly, without all this rambling. Yes, I confess, I was horny. After my anxiety had left me, I languished alone in my apartment, feeling the tug of desire. All my babbling has come to this little head: I was desperately and wickedly horny. But for my body, my body, my body. Hungry and obsessed with food, I starved myself, and all my rationalizations and reveries fail to explain such desiccation.

Some women have beautiful mouths, and some women rise out of chairs, and they sit down in chairs, and some women tilt their heads, and their skirts sway with the movement of their hips, and some women yield a power in their eyes, which is soft and kind and warm, and more alluring than a siren's song. All the while, their limbs exude sexuality like a sticky scent. They move among us, in the office, on the college campus, at the checkout line in the grocery store. These women have become their bodies. Most women, however, reserved from moment to moment, become their bodies more fully when the lights are low; against the drowsy backdrop of night, against the rhythm of a beating heart, something inside of them begins to hum and glow. But meanwhile, in a sad city apartment, a tall, awkward, pale man leaned over his sink, conscious of his own absurdity. His sexuality wasn't so much a lure, an enticement, as it was an offense.

Although this thought bothered me for long stretches of time, I had moments when my mind turned toward other subjects. It was at these moments—when through some gradual circumlocution of ideas—my mind slid along, back to the oppressive thought, approaching it from an unexpected angle. For example, one evening I was sitting at my computer, working on my manuscript, when I paused for a second and tried to remember if I was supposed to put out the blue recycling container this Tuesday or the next. I got up and went to the kitchen to check the calender magneted to the refrigerator door. All the while, my mind was slowly sliding along a seemingly innocuous track of thought, and when I returned to my desk chair, I began to wonder if I had made a mistake by snubbing Morris the sister. This woman was in my mind, and against my will, she crept upon me as a sexual prospect. Another time, I woke up in the night to use the bathroom, and as I leaned over the toilet, urinating, in a mild, groggy daze, I suddenly realized that I was thinking about Claudia Jones, what child is this, sitting on her milkcrate and humming her song. Her plump, milky flesh—mute and stupid and heavy—somehow struck me as appealing and comfortable.

Other, more conscious moments, I tried to remember my waif, the young woman who had run off with my manuscript, but she had abandoned my fantasy life. Because I had played with her too much in my mind, she seemed to lose her flesh. Ironically, she ceased to be a real person, and thus being a fantasy, she was evicted from my fantasies. At last, I wanted something I could actually touch. Unfortunately, my social circle was so small that scarcely anyone dwelled within my range. The woman from Dyfus was just as unreal as my skinny thief; besides, the woman represented a force and a threat. I was less likely to give her a kiss than to stand upon a train track, open my arms, and take a full-bodied, locomotive kiss. Most men—perhaps driven by instinct to preserve the species—erect their whole persona upon this basic pursuit. They comb their hair, buy their cars, and build their houses the same way that a spider weaves its web. All their energy, under a thin disguise, goes toward the conquest. Like other men, as well as every pubescent boy, I was finally willing to take part in the struggle. I had discounted myself for my whole life. But now I was caught between the extremes of male sexuality, lusting after the two ends of the spectrum. They just happened to be my most obvious prospects. On one end, just one space left of the Whore, was the bovine idiot, as thick as flesh and fetish. And on the other, a little right of the Mother, was that sacred lady, layer upon layer of ivory and porcelain.

I knew that if I were to make a concerted effort upon the playing field of men, I ought to have as many fronts as possible, and thus work upon both women at the same time. For Claudia Jones, because I was a complete stranger to her, I had the bridge of apathy to cross. Of course, I could have made myself known to her; that would have been as easy as throwing a stone at her. The real task was to make her want to know me, to make her interested. I didn't bother to consider the next step, namely how to convert docile bovinity into desire. I figured that once I was near to her, I could simply move myself upon her body, while she would put less ardor into her lovemaking than she put into her eating; all my sweaty effort could provoke no greater reaction out of her than that vague, listless indifference with which a grazing cow lifts its head for a moment, continues to chew, and then, still chewing, turns its face back toward the ground. For Morris the sister, because I had offended her, I had the citadel of animosity to raze to the ground. For all intents and purposes, I had already whacked her with a stone. I hoped that she was of that religious type who not only expected pain and suffering from the world but also wore her battle scars as proof of her faith. I wrote her a letter explaining that I fully understood why she'd snubbed me and left me sitting alone in the coffee shop. I deserved to be treated severely. As a side note, I added that on that fateful Sunday afternoon I finally realized how awful I must have been for such a kind woman to treat me so cruelly. I licked and mailed the missive. I had nothing to lose. Undoubtedly, finding the letter in her mailbox, she would first feel a bit shocked, and then reading it, she would become confused—until, of course, her eyes lighted upon the word “Sunday,” which wasn't the day we had arranged to meet on. If she were as trusting as I hoped, she would assume that I had made an error or, perhaps, that she'd made the error. I could still be saved.

My first front mobilized, I had only to wait for the response, and if I heard nothing for a week, I'd make another advance. I didn't know what this would be, but I knew that if it also failed, I'd try again. With persistence, I planned to worm my way into the heart of that little peach. Although all my past experience told me that women are unfathomable, distant, and closed, I recognized that the history of man was a history of seduction. Of course, I wasn't made like a mighty son of Priam, who could take a woman by force and lock her up in his bed chamber. Nor like a young, handy, rutting scholar, could I have been bold enough to saunter up beside her, grab hold of her by the quim, and swear my death was imminent without her loving. Yet, Homer and Chaucer aside, perhaps I was able to act like a cousin to the sweet maiden, drive her around and around until her fatigue and my constancy wore her down, and then, at that moment, work my puny, insidious magic charm. Unfortunately, Victorian modesty prevented Thomas Hardy from fleshing out the details of such a young girl's seduction, and so my manual was lacking. Even though I didn't know how the “cousin” actually un-frocked and de-bloomered the maiden, I knew that he pestered and wooed her until she finally gave in. If Hardy proved anything about the female race, it was that a woman is simply seething passion all bundled up and straining against the seams of her corset, waiting for the slightest tug upon the slightest thread, so she may burst forth and unravel upon her man. With hope, Morris the sister, my own pretty “Tess,” may have unraveled upon me.