The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories (2 page)

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.

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.

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 sound 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.

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.

Cass came home the next day with a pile of books about eggs for me to read. I thought,
She’s already trying to take over.
I thanked her.

“I might read them too,” she said.

“I’ll recommend one.” I carried the whole pile into my room, shutting the door with my heel. I stuck them under the bed.

In the end I read them, of course. I studied them, even; I took notes. That was how Cass got her way, by being right.

You cannot make an egg from a lump of earth, and a haunch of beef carved into a sphere is also nothing like it, nor can one be fashioned from blood and barley, or suet and cinnebar, or indeed any substance whatever. I am confident that a trip to the moon would bring back no substance however new to earth that would in any kind resemble the egg.

Extraordinary as the egg already is, there are stories of an inner, more essential egg, a sort of distillate: a fragrant red crystal, which some propose as the “pill of immortality” described by Wei Po-Yang in the first half of the second century
A.D.

I understood that the egg was mine to care for. I was to brood over it, the books agreed. What that meant was not quite clear. Was I supposed to sit on top of it? From the landing of the back steps I stretched one foot out to the top of the egg. My foot slipped and in catching my balance I banged my chin on the splintery rail. “What are you doing?” said Cass from above.

“Nothing,” I said. It was almost a sob, but that was because my chin hurt. I sat down on the steps.

The books said that the egg would not grow to its full size without help. Without attention—love, yes, but also suspicion and fear, all of which push and pull inside the egg, awakening and differentiating it—it would be stunted, small and hard. They described this “abortion” in almost identical turns of phrase, as if reciting a lesson. “The neglected egg is dense and hard as a croquet ball. Flesh heaps on flesh in a rude aggregation, as a pearl forms in an oyster, or a tumor in place of a child.” As if a bud opened on a wodge of fused petals. The egg would grow, somehow, without my care—eggs do. But what would it become? “A lay figure, stony, no better than a statue; a lifeless lump.”

“The eggs are obviously spacecraft. Some are reconnaissance vehicles. Some are mobile homes. You see little pinks and long reds. They peek out the windows. Or they descend, on beams of light. The pinks are the clever ones. The master race, if you will. They study us. They judge us. But the reds are there to intercede for us, to plead for mercy,” said Cindy Halbschnitt, who was abducted and returned to tell her tale. “I wasn’t afraid. I knew—how shall I put it?—I was loved.”

I would brood, if that was what the egg needed. It was a worthwhile thing to do—maybe the only worthwhile thing to do, even if I didn’t know why. And though it required an openness and sincerity that didn’t come naturally, I thought that for the egg I could learn to love without reserve. Maybe the egg was my chance at what everyone else seemed to feel all the time: the cozy feeling of being-with, the worth-it-ness of love. But these
thoughts were secondary. I would brood because I needed to. Being near the egg was like scratching
next to
an itch. The closer I got the more keenly I felt my separation from it.

My friends—Roky, Tim, Deedee—thought I’d make a joke out of it, remembering how I had smirked at Deedee’s chanting circle, Tim’s banana-tempeh power drinks. Cynical Imogen. In fact I had been waiting, hoarding myself, for that call.

Yes, it was a burden. That thought did cross my mind. There were other things in life: clever little shaggy ponies, surveillance devices, snowboarding. There were excellent curries. There was probably a girl reading Genet somewhere. She might like midcentury modern furniture, but she would come to understand my thrift store armchair, in time. But once the egg had come to me, it was impossible to imagine a life that didn’t contain it.

Some say we are trying to hatch Christ. Like Phanes, Eros, Nangarena: incubator babies all. Christ, Antichrist, Big Bird, God or Godzilla, who knows? We are undertaking a project itself entirely indefinite (yet with high, though vague standards), in anticipation of a result on which no one can agree. Why?

“Why?” said Roky. He turned the pegs on my dusty guitar, tuning it absentmindedly.

I could only answer that while the luster of adolescent fantasy might have dazzled me at first, it was the lusciousness and dignity of the egg itself that sealed my commitment to it. The egg was serious, even melancholy, but it knew how to play; it was quiescent, and yet teeming with life, rich with invention
and innovation. It made no scenes and did not argue for itself, but answered all doubters by virtue of its unfeigned excellence.

“I don’t know, I guess I’m curious,” I said.

Since we turn food into flesh our whole life long, the doctrine of bodily resurrection presents at least one problem. We form enough new cells in the course of living to reflesh ourselves many times over. Are some cells elected to immortality and others extinguished forever? The ingenious deity of the heretic sect that called themselves the Ovaries (before they were wiped out in 1265) provides for those extra cells, lumps them together and gives them a new life—as guides, as judges, as spies. As eggs. One might also call them angels.

I took the stuff from my Mrs. Potato Head kit down to the backyard and I punched two eyes, a nose, and a mouth into the egg. I kept them close together, a tiny face on the side of a planet. Juice from its puncture ran down the nose and hung off the tip.