No Enemy But Time

by Michael Bishop

As Hugo stumbled back down the hill, a battery of klieg lights flashed on, illuminating the entire complex and a formidable swatch of highway.

  John-John’s father fled the scene, obviously intending to return to the motel, but driving recklessly fast. Three or four miles from Ritki’s he was intercepted by a trooper going in the opposite direction. The trooper braked, wrestled his car about, and set off after the Dart at high speed, siren and tires screaming. The night came alive with the spooky, peacocklike cries and the revolving blue strobes of one willful machine prodding another to the brink of self-annihilation. Even when the superior horsepower of the state vehicle had plainly decided the outcome of their contest, Hugo kept gunning the accelerator. The result was that the Dart capsized, fired one rear tire off its rim into the woods, and pinned Hugo beneath the steering column and the spectacularly dimpled roof.

  * * *

  Back from her sabbatical in New York, Jeannette was waiting for John-John when he finally got home. Anna was there, too, as distraught as he had ever seen her. By this time Hugo was slowly, painstakingly dying, and no one knew what to say to anybody else to alter, disguise, or soften this fact. It was not Jeannette’s fault, John-John knew. No, of course not; it was definitely not his mother’s fault. But from that moment he began withdrawing from Jeannette; and later, when it seemed to him that she had taken steps to sacrifice him to her ambition, he did not find it difficult to close the door on his life with the Monegals and to run away from home.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Habiline Reflections

  THE EVENING THAT HELEN RETURNED MY PISTOL I WAS as nervous as a seventeen-year-old virgin. My confusion had a simple source: I did not know what mode of approach and receptivity must prevail between us. This confusion, baldly stated, has certain humorous overtones that I did not fully appreciate at the time.

  Pair bonding, as I believe I have shown, was a common feature of the habiline lifestyle. Although the resident cock of the wadi, or alpha male, might with impunity coerce somebody else’s cutie into his clutches, he usually had a favorite among these rotating concubines. In Alfie’s case, of course, this was Emily, and after Genly’s death she became his permanent live-in.

  Observing this, I decided that Alfie had had designs upon Emily from the beginning, but that his status among the Minids and his uneasy relationship with Genly had not permitted him to surrender to out-and-out monogamy. To have done so would have been to risk another serious run-in with his only real rival among the men, for Genly was not so cowed as he sometimes contrived to appear. Therefore, not only to reaffirm his preeminence in the band but also to minimize the chances of a savage knock-down-drag-out with Genly, Alfie had had to bestow his affections upon Guinevere and Nicole as well as Emily.

  Inadvertently, then, I had helped provide Alfie with an escape from the prison of his own power. He no longer had to lord it over the wives of Jomo and Fred in order to underscore his chieftancy, for Jomo was too old and Fred too young to represent genuine threats to his leadership. Variety being a much-sought-after spice, Alfie did not completely forgo the company of other ladies while establishing a household with Emily, but his philandering took on a decidedly illicit cast, occurring out of doors and catch-as-catch-can rather than by invitation in the sacrosanct confines of his hut. He was a changed and seemingly happier man.

  So was I, albeit a confused one, too. Wherefore my confusion?

  First, without deliberately engaging in voyeurism, I had seen plenty. The habilines were an uninhibited people. Their natural rhythms, if you will pardon a phrase with an unhappy history, had an immediate outlet in their personal relationships. Couples coupled when coupling called. Ordinarily they sought privacy in which to answer this summons, but not always. Anyone with eyes would eventually learn that Minid males pressed their suits from behind and that, in order to facilitate disengagement should a dinothere come dithering along or a porcupine prickling past, partners often remained upright. Although I, too, placed a premium on survival, these approaches were not my style.

  Second, they were not invariably the Minids’ style, either. Sometimes a couple disappeared into a strip of forest, where in a half-hidden bower they lay side by side on plaitings of savannah grass and rocked in each other’s arms like children afraid of the dark. (I had once stepped on Malcolm and Miss Jane so disposed.) Was this a nocturne of love or merely a melody of mutual consolation? I did not know, but I had a hunch that among the Minids now, eyes had more to say to them than rump or pubic promontories. Granted, they could still find pleasure in the backward amorousness favored even today by Kalahari Bushmen, but their options seemed to be increasing, their tastes growing more catholic. Slowly, however; very slowly.

  Third, despite all I had witnessed and surmised, I did not yet know if habiline women enjoyed a state of constant sexual receptivity or if they were the love slaves of an estrous cycle. Had Alfie invited Emily, Guinevere, and Nicole in and out of his hut in solitary heats because no other arrangement afforded him the unadulterated pleasure of their company? Or did he, requiring a brief recuperative respite as surely as the next man, order these entries and withdrawals in accordance with a tyrannical cycle of his own? Among chimpanzees the females develop cumbersome sexual swellings to signal their readiness to mate (“pink ladies,” Jane Goodall once called the possessors of these fragrant passion flowers), but habiline women, naked under their long and scanty hair, were fortunate in never having to flaunt such gaudy carnal corsages.

  I, meanwhile, was unfortunate in having no clue to Helen’s designs, if any, on my person. After setting my pistol aside, I drew her to me. Although stronger than I, with hands capable of ripping apart the rib cage of a hippopotamus carcass, Helen did not resist. Her head nuzzled my armpit, and we lay back together on the grasses of my pallet. I think she was listening to my heartbeat, which was bongoing calypso rhythms in the constricted drum of my chest. She listened for a long time. The singing of the melancholy habilines ceased, and the sunset glow on the horizon beyond New Helensburgh gave way to a lustrous eggplant color and a dot-to-dot patterning of stars. Soon Helen was asleep. Putting my uncertainty about her intentions on hold, I too finally slept.

  * * *

  At dawn I awoke to find Helen staring down at me with those bright, smoky eyes. All my previous doubts and apprehensions came surging back. What did she want of me? What did I want of her? How were we to bridge the chasms of anatomy, angst, and animality separating us? A gray light filtered into my hut through the gaps in its thatching, and it seemed to me that Helen and I were tree mice, primed for some rapacious giant’s lightning grab.

  “What?” I asked Helen. “What do we—?”

  Helen lowered her eyes, meaningfully rather than demurely. Her gaze came to rest on my tattered bush shorts. If I could pass the physical, I would qualify in her estimation as a suitable husband. Since coming among the Minids—as, initially, with Babington at Lolitabu—I had been guarded about my biological functions, and to date Helen had had no assurance that I was not as neuter as a Kewpie doll under my Fruit of the Looms. Although I cannot ordinarily do business under the eyes of strangers, Helen was no longer a stranger, and with trembling fingers I moved to allay her doubts.

  First, though, I unknotted the red bandanna about my throat and showed it to Helen. She remembered it from our first meeting, when I had attempted to win her over with a bauble and she had spurned the offer by raising both her hackles and her club. This morning, though, the offer charmed her, and she allowed me to tie the bandanna around her neck as a betrothal gift. Indeed, it constituted her entire trousseau. The moment lengthened, and I will never forget the way she looked as we shared it.

  Even with my shorts off, I was not entirely a Minid. My mind kept tracking back and forth, sorting data, printing unflattering labels on my natural appetites: bestial, perverse, reprehensible, depraved. My parents, bless their souls, would have been appalled by my yearnings, and an old country boy like our Wyoming landlord Pete Grier would have seen more po
etry in a farm boy’s hasty violation of an indifferent heifer than in my adult attraction to the willing Helen Habiline.

  Helpless to prevent what was going to occur, I tried to make a concession to both Good Sense and Conscience. In so doing I confused Helen about the exact nature of my masculinity.

  Naked and erect, I rolled aside from Helen, grabbed a foil-wrapped condom from my first-aid kit, and fumbled the ring of folded latex out of its packaging. Then I unrolled the condom’s milky second skin over the instrument of our impending union and turned to face my bride. Helen was taken aback. So was I. My sincerity was suddenly suspect, even to myself. Despite the deep affection and healthy lust that the Minid woman had engendered in me, my recourse to a prophylactic declared that I had certain nagging doubts that annulled the purity of my passion. Was I afraid that I might impregnate Helen? No. All the available evidence suggested that she was barren. No, I was not thinking of Helen. The specter of venereal disease, age-old scourge of the promiscuous and the incontinent, had struck from my subconscious and I had grabbed for my first-aid kit. Now, I was momentarily unmanned by the pettiness of my behavior. Helen looked at me wide-eyed. I was a melting Tootsie Roll in a casing of wrinkled liquid latex.

  “You probably think I’ve got to perform lickety-damn-split-quick or I can’t do anything at all,” I told her, embarrassed.

  Cautiously Helen reached out and touched the ring of my condom. She had undoubtedly seen the everted skins of snakes cast on the ground or caught in the forks of trees, but undoubtedly none of the males of her acquaintance had ever reversed the ecdysial process in this priapic particular. Soon her curiosity overcame her fear, and she drew her finger around the ring. Flash-freezing my ardor and unwrinkling my second skin, I saluted, greatly startling her.

  “Give me a minute, Helen—I’ll take it off.”

  This was easier promised than performed. Electrolysis, I swear, plucks hair less painfully. But I managed.

  Off, the prophylactic still fascinated Helen. She took it from my hands and lifted it over her head as if it were one of those repulsive delicacies favored by the French. She refrained, thank Ngai, from popping it into her mouth, and I took it back. Inspired by the notion that our get-together was a celebration as well as a solemn rite, I inflated the condom’s pale skin to the size of a bowling ball and tied it off at the ring as my mother had once tied off party balloons. Electronically Tested for Reliability read a legend near the ring. Buoyant, my condom and I demonstrated the innate risibility of tumescence.

  Helen’s eyes grew wider. Her bottom lip dropped. Then she snapped her mouth shut and reached for the balloon. However, she must have scraped its taut skin with a fingernail, for the next thing I heard was an ear-splitting P*O*P*! and Helen’s involuntary cry of distress. I went down almost as fast as my condom.

  Terrified, Helen rolled away to the wall, clutching her knees and biting her lovely deep-purple lip. Tossing aside the illegible postscript of my French letter, I hurried to apply to her forehead the frank of my consoling kiss. Before Helen could respond, Jomo and Alfie burst uninvited into the hut.

  “Jesus!” I exclaimed.

  Then I saw their faces. Jomo and Alfie were reacting to the report of the punctured condom, and their bleak expectation—another habiline shot dead—Helen’s huddled form seemed all too neatly to fulfill. I struggled to pull the lady upright and myself together.

  “It wasn’t the pistol, brothers. We popped a balloon. Nothing to worry about. Only a balloon . . .”

  Talking soothingly to Helen, I got her to a sitting position. Jomo and Alfie squatted in front of her, looking glances of silent inquiry into her eyes, and she replied by looking back at them the answers they seemed to want. The crisis was past. Helen was alive and well.

  The men, noticing my nakedness, scrutinized me skeptically. If they persisted in their contemplation, I reflected, my plumbing would be on the fritz for a week. What I had neither intimidated nor impressed them. After looking at each other with the open-mouthed “play faces” common to young chimpanzees and the children of Kalahari Bushmen, they left the hut and apparently reported what they had seen to their compatriots outside. A moment later, the Minids were serenading the dawn sky with a hoarse, many-throated aubade.

  I returned to Helen. We settled back on my pallet in each other’s arms. As the strands of untutored habiline singing gradually unraveled into silence, my bride let me coax her round. I let her coax me round, too. Genly was dead, but we were alive, and the difference was crucial. With the echoes of twentieth-century disapproval dying in my mind, I embraced Helen, put my lips to her brow, and somehow succeeded in joining with her on an elemental level that only a few weeks ago would have struck even me as unthinkable.

  * * *

  Physiologically, I concluded, Helen enjoyed a state of continuous sexual receptivity. However, she also experienced ups and downs of appetite that probably stemmed from her menstrual cycle, for in this female particular she was almost wholly human. We accommodated each other’s needs, and if Helen occasionally withheld herself for several days, these bouts of protracted abstinence eventually worked to purge me of passion—much in the way that a lengthy fast inevitably undermines hunger. Together again, rediscovering the pleasure of the act, we fed on each other like starving carrion birds. Nor did I ever again insult my lady by producing a condom and thereby reminding her of how close I had come to bursting the promise of our romance.

  Through discreet observation I confirmed that Helen was different from most of the habiline womenfolk in the disposition of her sexual organs. Whereas Dilsey, Guinevere, Emily, and all the rest had labia set almost directly beneath their anuses, Helen’s genital flower bloomed in a more forward location. This placement made it possible for us to consummate our mutual lusts face to face, the technique we preferred above all others. The other Minids, with some infrequent exceptions, as I have noted, usually mated after the fashion of mandrills and mangy australopithecines—but Helen was a human being in my sight, and our love was not bestial but sublime. I insist upon this point because there are so many people whose prejudices force them to deny what to me was self-evident from the moment of our first coupling.

  (Later, of course, I had other, even better, proof of Helen’s humanity—but I do not wish to run ahead of my story.)

  In the intervals between each rush of passion, Helen and I carried on as friends and companions. Our sense of oneness seldom permitted us to leave the other’s sight. I deloused her, and she fed me berries and tree mice. We scavenged, hunted, and foraged together. Side by side, we wandered the veldt and gallery forests. In Ngai’s eyes, at least, we were surely husband and wife.

  I did not empedestal Helen, though. She had faults that I am not ashamed or embarrassed to record. For one thing, she sometimes stank. Her hair would become matted with grease or coated with dust, and the lack of water in the area made it difficult to remedy these problems. Once, under the pretext of play, I enticed my bride into the last remaining wallow of a rivercourse not far from New Helensburgh and there applied a piece of pumice stone to her back and belly. Afterward she smelled better, and behaved coquettishly, and gibbered at me her girlish gratitude. She did not like to be dirty.

  A second fault here springs to mind. Helen could launch one-sided prattlefests, but she could not really talk to me. Although she was hardly to be blamed for this failing, I had begun to miss the sterling inanities of human conversation. I would have given two years’ pay and perquisites to hear from her pretty lips a single “Hot enough for you?” or “Have a nice day.” Instead I got tuneless scatsinging and a great deal of murmurous blather.

  I decided that Helen must learn to speak. During my in-depth training for White Sphinx at Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base, Blair had introduced me to some of the current research on animal vocalization, and my understanding of this subject led me to conclude that Helen’s Babelesque cries and whispers were limbic in origin. That is, they had very little to do with the neurology of human speec
h, which flows like a river of light from the neocortical headwaters of Broca’s and Wernicke’s regions. Researchers can prod a rhesus monkey to spill its entire reservoir of natural calls by flooding current into electrodes sunk like spigots in the limbic lobes. So primed, the monkeys babble indiscriminately.

  By contrast, Helen’s prating was uniform in its emotional content and uncoerced, but “primitive” in that it rose from brain tissue older than those from which human speech pours forth, limpid and sustaining. (When, of course, it is not turbid and constipating.) I wondered if Helen had the cerebral wherewithal to learn what I had resolved to teach her. And concluded that she must, not merely because endocasts of hominid brains have given proof of their incipient Broca’s areas, but also because my habilines possessed a repertoire of sounds so far beyond that of beasts that even I could not satisfactorily ape it.

  Human beings have had reasonable success teaching rudimentary American Sign Language to chimpanzees and gorillas. However, I did not know this system, and the gestural language of the Minids already contained subtleties and refinements too nice for my apprehension. Even so, they best “talked” among themselves using facial expressions and eye movements, the way wolves are said to reveal a full gamut of canine strategies and desires. Likewise the Minids. A squint or a blink could apprise another in the band of the whereabouts of nearby vegetables. A puckering of mouth or brow could provide a telling gloss on this communication. Both text and gloss, unfortunately, were in an alphabet almost opaque to me, and although I did come to understand a little of Helen’s eye language, I made up my mind to teach her English.

  I started with pronouns. Pronouns befuddle and exasperate. As in an old Tarzan movie or Abbot and Costello routine, pronouns deny or misconstrue themselves as soon as the instructor thumps his chest or nods pupilward. “I,” I said, pointing at myself: “I, I, I.” Although Helen could say this word, she pronounced it like the preface to a bloodcurdling hunting cry. No matter. My heart leapt. Of course, when I tried to teach her the word’s semantic value, to demonstrate that she had encompassed the concept, she poked me repeatedly in the chest with her gnarled thumb, all the while murmuring, “Ai, Ai, Ai.” It took me a day to undo the damage, a feat I managed only with superhuman patience and the artful deployment of my shaving mirror.