The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories

by Jackson, Shelley

  My favorite recipe is this: lay the sperm directly on the burner. As the skin crackles and splits, releasing the liquors, turn the sperm. When it is entirely relaxed, remove and cool. Peel off the bitter skin with a fork, and discard. Under it you will find a layer of translucent fat. Cut this off, press it through clean muslin and reduce it to the consistency of gruel over a low flame. Run the skinned sperm under a broiler to brown, garnish with orange slices, and top with the reduced liquors.

  With a little ingenuity, the sperm’s incredible propulsive power can be harnessed for your own enjoyment! Not just for professional daredevils, this sport can be enjoyed by practically anyone with a sense of adventure—and a few friends ready to lend a hand. Lure the sperm into a large net bag (used bags can be acquired cheap from many sporting goods stores). Cinch the bag tight around the sperm’s tail. Secure your boat to the bag with a few sturdy ropes and launch it. Whee! Carry a stick: a poke at the right moment will help steer the beast. But not to worry: the sperm’s own self-protective instincts will keep you clear of most obstacles.

  I trap them in nets I string up across their trails and sell them to a guy down in L.A. who puts them on TV. You know, those shows where they got to rassle the gladiators in the ring. Everyone knows the shows are rigged anyway, they dope the sperm, so I don’t know why they bother to get the dangerous ones, I guess they want them big. Of course sometimes they guess wrong on the dosage or they get a real sly one or something and he lays the chick out just like that! Gladiator my ass, they’re just models, gals who couldn’t make it on the runway or old ones on the way down. You know who’s the real gladiator? Take a wild fucking guess!

  Yes, they’re cute! You may be tempted to try to keep young sperm as pets, and it’s true that hatchlings will remain small almost indefinitely, if kept in a small bowl or terrarium. But you must not forget that these so-called bonsai sperm are not the bumbling infants they resemble. They are cunning and they hold a grudge. It is neither humane nor prudent to keep them from answering “the call of the wild.”

  At times, for reasons we don’t fully understand, the normally evasive spermatozoon will form a permanent bond with one woman. When the sperm is young, the woman may be inclined to subtly encourage this fidelity, perhaps without even knowing she is doing so. As the sperm grows older and some awareness penetrates its puny brain of the gulf that separates it from the beloved, the relationship turns treacherous. The sperm will stalk her with increasing cunning. Sperm can bounce several stories, and their elasticity also enables them to squeeze through improbably small spaces. In the movie theater where she has sought refuge, she will spot the ominous dome across the aisle, dully reflecting the changing light. In the ladies’ room she will see a glistening tail on the floor of the next stall. Outside the window of the restaurant where she is holding hands with her date something will rise and fall in the dark, blotting out the city lights below. The clever antics of a pup are not so cute when the sperm is fully grown. Indeed, the mature sperm are all the deadlier for their devotion, and more than one woman has been crushed to death by a creature she once jounced on her lap.

  Sperm-brain swallowing is considered dangerous by the medical establishment, but devotees disagree. What is known is that the sperm brain does not die all at once but forms a temporary bond with the stomach lining, marshaling an unknown number of the host’s cells to its service for as long as six hours, after which time the brain is digested and the host cells revert to their usual condition. Doctors claim the “high” users report is largely imaginary, but stories are consistent of a spreading “spermishness”: a sense of haste and unstoppable purpose. The concomitant disregard for personal injury, property, or propriety can lead swallowers to extravagant ventures, some criminal or self-destructive, some visionary. Great works of art have been inspired by sperm-brain swallowing; so have hideous crimes, including the infamous “Ballet of Decapitations.”

  The cloud image of a sperm stretched out across the sky over Lisbon and again in Nubia has been taken for a sign by cultists who await the day they will be “exalted” into the creatures they worship, and allowed to join their packs. Adherents are gathering in public places, where they drop to their stomachs en masse and undulate in imitation of the movements of their totem. Ironically, several of these “Spermists” have fallen prey to bona fide members of the species who do not seem to recognize their special status.

  We lodge our sperm in stalls we have painted with polka dots, and curry them with soft brushes and chamois cloths. We show them the spigot so that they may approve it, then tamp the sharp end into their side with a small mallet, and hook on the bucket. The milk is thick and sweet. Fresh, it is an aphrodisiac. It is also good for the digestion and, rubbed on the face, it clears the complexion. Reduced and dried in cakes it makes a nutritious trail bar and a good soap. We are working on a motor that will run on sperm milk. We do make good money from our products, but we channel it all back into the sacred community, to buy softer bedding for our sperm, and hire musicians to play the songs they love.

  Once numerous, their herds raised a line of dust across the Great Plains, racing the locomotive. This opening sequence has become a cliché of film westerns: dust first, then a line of bobbing backs stretching across the screen. The nearby whistle of the train; some of the sperm cross the tracks, some turn, some scatter. Beside the tracks as the train thunders by, a sperm slumps in the dirt, transfixed by an arrow. Its oily coat is covered with dust, dung, and straw. It looks like a breaded drumstick.

  …

  The midwestern strain of the spermatozoa, who ravage wheat fields in bouncing armies, is lighter in color and has unusual markings which help to conceal it in tall grass. While most sperm drop their tiny young in water, these have devised other means of providing their offspring the moist environment they need. In early summer, the adults congregate head to head in small circles of five to eight and begin to blow wetly through their snouts. They puff and bubble until they work up a sizable mound of viscous foam, then position themselves and insert the infant sperm deep within the trembling dome. The outside of the dome soon hardens to a glassy sheen under the sun and prevents further drying. The dim shadows of the young can be seen to pike and writhe from time to time, but the hug of the thick foam holds them safely in suspension. They grow all summer long undisturbed—their only real enemy, aside from the occasional vigilant farmer with a pickaxe, is a species of heron that has adapted its long bill for the purpose of drilling through the dome and spearing the baby sperm. However, since the bird rarely catches more than one sperm at a time through the small hole it has gone to such pains to open, it poses little threat to the sperm population as a whole. By fall the spermatozoa are large and restless, and their dark skins are clearly visible through the dome. Here we see nature’s genius: the shells that withstood sun and wind so imperviously melt in minutes under the first warm rain. The sperm are released into the wet grass. They lie there, quivering with surprise. Then they take their first timorous bounce.

  FOETUS

  The first fœtus was sighted in the abandoned hangar outside our town. Just floating there, almost weightless, it drifted down until its coiled spine rested on the concrete and then sprang up again with a flex of that powerful part. Then the slow descent began afresh. It was not hiding. It was not doing anything, except possibly looking, if it could see anything from between its slitted lids. What was it looking at? Possibly the motes of dust, as they drifted through the isolated rays of sun and changed direction all at once like birds flying together. Or at the runic marks of rust and bird shit on the walls. Maybe it was trying to understand them, though that might be imposing too much human order on the fœtus, who is known, now, for being interested in things for (as they say) their own sake—incomprehensible motive to most of us!

  The fœtus rarely opens its eyes when anyone is watching, but we know they are deep blue-black, like a night sky when space shows through it, and its gaze is solemn, tender, yet so grand as to be almost mur
derous.

  …

  “We weren’t afraid,” said little Brent Hadly, who with his cousin Gene Hadly made the discovery, and took the first photos—we’ve all seen them—with his little point-and-shoot. “We thought it was Mr. Fisher in one of his costumes.” (Mr. Fisher is one of those small-town loonies affectionately tolerated by the locals. He did indeed don a fœtus costume, later on, and paraded down to the Handimart parking lot—where he gulled some big-city newsmen, to their chagrin.) “Then my daddy came and said, ‘Cut the fooling, Fisher!’ ” But even when the Fisher hypothesis had been disproved, no one felt anything but gentle curiosity about the visitor. Indeed, they scarcely noticed it had drifted near the small crowd while they debated, and trailed after them when they left.

  The fœtus is preternaturally strong. It grabs its aides and knocks their bald heads together. It carries pregnant women across busy streets. It helps with the groceries. These are the little ways it enters the daily life of its parishioners: it turns over the soil in an old woman’s garden. It lifts waitresses on tables to show off their legs. The fœtus has a formal appreciation for old-fashioned chivalry, and expects to be thanked for such gestures.

  The fœtus roved about the town until it found a resting place to its liking in the playground of the municipal park, among dogs and babies. The mothers and the professional loiterers appointed themselves guards and watched it sternly, heading off the youngsters who veered too near it, but they softened to it over time, began to bring sandwiches and lemonade along and make casual speculations about the fœtus’s life span, hopes, and origins. When the crowds of tourists pressed too close, they became the fœtus’s protectors, and formed a human chain to keep them out.

  Nobody’s enemy and nobody’s friend, it hides its heart in a locked box, a secret stash, maybe a hollow tree in the woods under a bees’ nest, maybe a tower room on a glass mountain on a wolf-run isle in a sea ringed by volcanoes and desert wastes. The fœtus always keeps its balance.

  Someone observed that the land seemed disarranged. Bent treetops, flattened grass, weeds dragged out of their seats, clods dislodged. Tedious speculations about crop circles and barrows and Andean landing strips made the rounds. Of course, we knew the fœtus’s little feet dragged when he walked. We had seen the marks in the sandbox at the park. We should have noticed the resemblance, but we resisted the idea that the fœtus was only a transient resident. We had grown accustomed to, even proud of it; the fœtus was a municipal landmark. It had put our town on the map and filled it with visitors, so that our children had a chance to envy the latest haircuts, and our adults the latest cars and sexual arrangements.

  Plus, the marks were disturbing. They were careless. They passed over (sometimes through) fences, even when the gate swung close at hand. Mrs. Sender’s oleanders were uprooted and dragged for miles. Even after we knew the fœtus caused the marks, a mystery clung to them. For everything the fœtus did, though, there was someone to praise it. Followers did their following on the paths it left. They said the paths proposed an aesthetic that could not at once be grasped. Some began dragging a foot behind them as they walked, scorning markless movement as noncommittal, therefore cowardly. But why was the fœtus so restless? Was it seeking something? We had all seen it peering through our curtains in the evening, and found the marks in our flowerbeds in the morning. Was it exercising, or aimlessly wandering? Or was it writing a kind of message on the earth? Was it driven from rest by some torment, a plague personal to it, or a plaguey thought it couldn’t shake: was the fœtus guilty?

  Since the fœtus arrived, none of us has loved without regret, fucked without apprehension, yearned without doubt. We break out in a rash when a loved one comes near because we know the fœtus is there too, waiting for us to prove to it everything it already knows.

  Was the fœtus a fœtus? Indeed it resembled one. But if it was, the question had to be raised: when the fœtus grew up, as it must, what would it become? Perhaps we all breathed a sigh of relief when scientists concluded that the fœtus, like the famous axolotl, was a creature permanently immature. Hence its enormous susceptibility, its patience and its eagerness to please. Like the unicorn, it adored virgins, but it had a raging fascination with sexual doings, a fascination that drove April Tip and the rest of her gang, the bad girls and boys of our town, to cruel displays under the streetlights around the park.

  At first, though not for long, we believed our fœtus was unique. Of course we speculated about the home it must have had somewhere else, about others. But here on earth it seemed a prodigy, the prodigy. Soon enough, however, more of them began to appear. Some dropped out of the sky, people said, slowly and beautifully, their light heads buoying them up. Commentators waxed eloquent and bade us imagine, on the blue, a dot that grew to a pink dot that grew to a kewpie doll that became the creature we know now. Many were found, like the first one, swaying gently in some warm and secret enclosure—warehouses, high school gyms, YMCA dressing rooms. Publicity seekers claimed to have come across fœtuses in infancy: tiny, playful, and virtually blind, like kittens, they bumbled around, falling on their oversized heads, and eagerly sucked on a baby finger, or indeed anything of like size and shape. One was reportedly discovered in a bird’s nest, opening its tiny translucent lips among the beaks. But fœtuses this small have never been held in captivity, or even captured on film. Whether that is because the susceptible creatures lose themselves in their surroundings, striving to become air, a patch of dirt, a falling leaf, or because they never existed in the first place, hardly matters, for the situation remains that none are found, except in stories that are already far from firsthand by the time they reach a credible authority. But we may pause for a minute to wonder whether, if such kittens do exist, they are the offspring of our original fœtus, who for all we know may be capable of fertilizing itself, like some plants, or if they grow from spores that have drifted here from some impersonally maternal comet, or—most mysterious thought of all—whether they spring up in our world self-generated, as sometimes new diseases appear to do, teaching us new pains, just because the world has left a place open for them.

  Behind one another’s eyes, it is the fœtus we love, floating in the pupil like a speck, like a spy. It’s looking over your shoulder, making cold drinks even colder, and it doesn’t care what promises you’ve made. We think we want affection, sympathy, fellow feeling, but it is the cold and absolute we love, and when we misplace that in one another we struggle for breath. Through the pupil’s little peephole, we look for it: the shapeless, the inhuman.

  Of course, with such a company of admirers, sycophants, interpreters, opportunists, advisers, prophets, and the like behind it, it wasn’t long before the fœtus was performing many of the offices once seen to by our local pastor: visiting the sick, hosting charitable functions, giving succor to troubled souls. One day Pastor Green simply left town, and no one was very sorry. It was the graceful thing to do, people agreed, and saw to it that the fœtus stood behind the pulpit the next Sunday. At first it held an honorary post; we couldn’t settle on a suitable title, but we did present it with a robe and a stiff white collar, which it seemed to admire. Higher-ups in church office were rumored to be uneasy about this unorthodox appointment, but public feeling was behind it. And there was no question that the fœtus would increase the church’s subscription thousandfold; no one had ever seen such a benefit potluck as the first one hosted by the fœtus. It wielded the ice cream scoop with tireless arm and paid personal attention to every dessert plate.

  Of course, the fœtus preferred to hold services in the sandbox, and the citizens appreciated this gesture as a call to simplicity and a sign of solidarity with regular folk. How the fœtus managed to lead us may be hard to understand. At first, its role was to inspire and chide. But it soon felt its way into the post, and began performing those gestures that mean so much to our town: choosing the new paint color for the courthouse (the fœtus preferred mauve), pouring the first bucket of cement for the new tennis courts. (We cou
ld afford it, for money was rolling in: tourists, visiting scholars, and zealots continued to come, prepared to shop, and after a short bewilderment we provided all the kiosks, booths, and lemonade stands they required.) Our fœtus made the covers of the major newsmagazines, and meanwhile, the copycat fœtuses were turning up everywhere, and the rich were installing them in their homes.

  The fœtus is made of something like our flesh, but not the same, it is a sort of über flesh, rife with potentialities (for the fœtus is, of course, incomplete—always; unfinished—perpetually), it is malleable beyond our understanding, hence unutterably tender, yet also resilient. A touch will bruise the fœtus, the nap of flannel leaves a print on its skin. The fœtus learns from what it neighbors, and may become what it too closely neighbors. Then your fœtus may cease to be; you may find yourself short one member of the household, yet in possession of a superfluous chair, a second stove, a matching dresser. The fœtus sees merit in everything; this is why it brings joy to houses, with its innocence, and is loved by children, but this quality is also its defect. A fœtus will adore a book of matches, and seek to become it; if you do not arrive in time your expensive companion will proudly shape itself into the cheapest disposable. It is one thing to duplicate the crown jewels, quite another to become the owner of two identically stained copies of yesterday’s paper, two half-full boxes of Kleenex, two phone bills.