MARCH 1997
Love's Labor Lost: EQUALITY
by Omar S. Castañeda
I. ILLICIT HUES
She thought she might become a terrier,
her toenails clicking in his kitchen, her head cocked expectantly at his
door, her tongue flicking up. She thought she would circle his mountain
goat rug until curling comfortably at his feet. She might accept a woman
wanting him in front of the firetheir drinking of blood-red wines,
their laughter, the woman's smooth delicious throat. She'd content herself
with his fingers under her muzzle, scratching, his large hand stroking the
arch of her back. All because someday he would make room for her on his
bed, say in his husky, sonorous voice, "That's my good girl,"
or "Yeah-ess: Princess, Bay-bee, Sweet-ums." And there in his
sheets, she would ascend into metamorphic dreams. It was uncertain.
On Tuesdays, with the
regularity of ash, she waited in the alcove beside his office. She always
imagined him coming out of his room, asking her for a piece of paper to
write a quick note for another student. "Oh," she'd hear him say,
"you got, maybe, a piece of scrap paper or something," his eyes
not really looking, not really stopping, but scurrying over the flat surfaces
of the alcove.
In that dream, she pulls
out a Bic pen, blue, and places the thin blade in her hands. The ink bleeds
through her skin and is siphoned up by his fingertips. She is perspiring,
nibbling her inner lip, until she can't take it anymore and flees. "Hey!"
he shouts. "I just wanted a goddamned scrap from you." His voice
is very high; his forearms are veined with ink, his mouth dribbles blue.
"Just something! Just a little bit of nothing!" But his voice
is far away, trailing, diminishing, like a tail of comet dust.
On Wednesdays, she watched
him from a campus park bench and found something of a dromedary in him:
his long neck and reflective pose; his woolly chin-chin.
On Thursdays, she cracked
pistachios between her knees and waited for him to appear and for her breath
to disappear. Always, it was the secretive dip of his fingers into his inner
coat pocket that sent her writhing, salty red spots dappling her knees.
On weekends, she imagined
two hundred phone calls.
Courting? This?
When she finally sleeps
with him it is his back that grows curly black hair. Yes. He growls into
her ear. His face lengthens. His nose grows cold. He laps affectionately
at her throat. He, ha-ha, he!
"Sit!" she
says. "Heel!"
She falls impatiently
back into his pillow and lights a Camel Filter.
He whimpers away.
Blue smoke rises to the
ceiling. She can hear him lapping his red thing and wonders how she ever
thought he was so?
He crouches in the corner.
Handsome? Dangerous?
One of his legs paddle-wheels
at a flea and scratches against the blue shag rug.
"God, Frank. It's
not like we promised each other anything."
"Yip."
"I was honest with
you from the start."
"Woof."
Her hand droops to the
edge of the bed. She feels exhausted. "God. OK."
He comes trailing an
ecstatic spray of pee. Yellow.
"I'm sorry,"
she says.
His tail slices the air.
There is power yet in
his beagle eyes: Her heart unfrowns. "Was it anything I did?"
"No," he whispers,
feeling the bones of his teeth shrink back. "No."
"Sure?"
"It was me."
"Hmm?" She
watches his ears shorten; lobes begin to appear.
"I mean it was me."
"M-hmm?" But
she is remembering the smell of a Baskin-Robbins, long ago. When? Where?
One we went to?
"I mean, why"
he says, "that is whenI asked for, you know, you to lie down...."
"Yes-ums?"
"Down, lie down,
I said. With the begonia over your ear. And the butter dribbled"
"Better?"
"Butter! Are you
deaf?"
"But you wanted
it melted."
The word brings back
his erection.
She giggles. "It
was too hot."
His tongue flicks up
against her earlobe.
"You're my professor!"
she whines with exaggeration, her fingers curled lightly around him.
Frank shudders. He leans
his head back to better feel her intimate caress. But something else takes
hold of him and he crumples into her lap.
"What?" she
asks.
His fur reappears. His
paws grow hard curved nails. "I'm afraid," he confesses.
Marcelina nods. And softer,
her voice bruised, her voice filling with something genuine: "Me too,
Frank."
Another man stands atop
a brown building facing this Victorian literature professor's colonial house.
"Aargh!" we hear. Or perhaps, "It's me! Why can't you see
this?" Or, "Oh! Oh! Oh!" It is a voice. Heard atop a brown
building. Only that is certain.
II. ORIGINAL SIN
7 Parrot noticed yellow flecks shifting
in the river bottom. He tried, rather naively, to pinch out the gold with
his fingers, but failed. Instead, he scooped out a handful of sand and placed
it into his cupped shirt. The water drained away, leaving a pile of gold-streaked
sand. He again tried to pick away the minute flecks, but it was really a
hopeless task. The flecks he did manage to pull out were not enough to cover
a fingernail. 7 Parrot saved the gold between his gums and front teeth.
It was painless and efficacious.
Later, in a playful mood,
7 Parrot merely smiled to show off his find. Shield Bearer was impressed.
She took her husband's arm, wiggled a fingernail up to his elbow and pulled
him close. "Palomita!" she said with teeth set on edge.
7 Parrot kissed her and
pulled back to be marveled at again. Shield Bearer, however, had marveled
enough in this passive way. She slowly undid his binding clothes. She ran
her fingernail across his nipples, along the muscles of his belly till they
twitched beneath the skin. She kissed his hip bone, softly, suckingly, her
admiration full of tongue.
7 Parrot smiled goldenly
into Shield Bearer's desire. She stroked his brightly colored beak and whispered,
"Macaw. Lord. Christ!" She rubbed the red and yellow feathers
of his cheek back toward his neck. "God, I want you," she said,
removing his trousers from around his scrawny ankles.
Wrapped in each other's
arms, they could not comprehend anything of the world outside their love.
So, it was with difficulty that they separated the next morning. They argued
viciously with their touches and tonguesboth of them arguing against
working that daybut shadowing those same arguments was the argument
that won: that their reunion would be even more ardent once ripened with
anticipation.
In the field, 7 Parrot
stared into the air and allowed his desire for Shield Bearer to consume
him, to build in him a series of images that entwined with such speed that
their connections seemed mystical, magical, beyond any guiding frame. He
saw egg dripping from the bottom of a nest. He climbed the golden tree and
found two whole eggs and the scattered shell of a third. He re-imagined
the fluid as it had protruded like a translucent twig, became globular,
then dropped under its own weight. This image brought back, first, the previous
night's passion, then his gold-flecked teeth reflected in Shield Bearer's
eyes. Then he imagined the lump of sand by the river with its tiny gold
flecks. Instantly, 7 Parrot envisioned the viscous and loving gaze of his
wife pouring through the nest.
He suddenly grasped the
knowledge emerging from that infinite sea of images, and plucked the nest
from the tree as if it were an apple. Back at the river, he scooped the
gold speckled sand into the nest. In time, he managed to pan a nugget of
gold the size of his littlest tooth.
Ah. The lovers' passionate
cries sprang from their throats as birds do, sharply, from vermilion hills,
and the air burst with their vespertine fervor as the sky shocks in storm.
"It is from that
moment on," 7 Parrot recounted to Shield Bearer as they lay in bed,
"that I gave up farming. There is nothing but the ordinary in it. I
have come home with gold in my teeth! I have stood before my wife with the
sun a parturition of my mouth. You have turned my life from one of drabness
to one of passion."
"I love you,"
she replied.
"I love you, my
apple. Oh, I love you." 7 Parrot kissed the curve of her shoulder.
"Together, there's nothing we can't feel, nothing of passion we will
not have as our own."
Shield Bearer blushed
with his excitement. "As for me," Shield Bearer said finally,
solemnly, still breathless from their intimate struggle, "I've decided
to shadow you. Where you thrive, so will I. Where you breathe, my happiness
abounds."
7 Parrot stroked her
moon face. "Follow me."
"I am your shadow,"
she said.
The following day, 7
Parrot took the bird nest and a pot and prepared to experiment. He put a
particularly glittery pile of sand into his pot and resolved to go through
it later, fleck by fleck. When 7 Parrot thought to look in the pot, the
sand was dried. He stared dumbly at the pile and harrumphed through his
nose. The air whisked away the minute grains. The flecks of gold remained
still. He harrumphed again and the soft grains of sand blew to the side
of the pot. In this wayhumphing and harrumphing7 Parrot
cleared enough sand so that he could lift out the gold. But he grew impatientand
not a little hyperventilated.
7 Parrot recalled how
volcanoes made a pudding of rocks, trees and not just a few animals. From
that moment on, he knew fire was the route to glory. He proved the correct
stacking of stones and earth to funnel heat. With that furnace, he discovered
the various melting points of matter. It wasn't long before he created a
metal pot and attempted his first smelting of gold. His first attempts taught
him the problems of separating gold from iron, gold from bronze, gold from
limestone. He wasted precious gold as quickly as he extracted it, with nothing
more to show for it but curiously gilded pots and pans and long handled
thongs. It wasn't until he had smelted enough worthless items to fill an
ark that he discovered very little heat was needed to smith his flecks and
gold nuggets into fine gold sheets. He looked back on the piles from his
Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age, and giggled with pride.
After weeks and months,
7 Parrot and Shield Bearer stepped into the dull wine light of the world
and lit up the sky. Everywhere the first people begat and disseminated so
that among their multiplicity there would be some who recognized the true
Sun and Moon, and others who were chattel.
Dressed in quetzal feathers,
leg trappings, ear pins, nose plugs and gold-threaded clothes, 7 Parrot
exclaimed: "I am great and shall rule over all people. I am the sun
and light; you are the moon and shadow. Great is our brightness. We are
the track and the path for the world. Our eyes are silver, our faces green
jade, blue turquoise. When we walk, people will say that the sun has arisen.
They will say that the moon is soon to follow. They will cry out that they
have no fear in the valley of the sun and moon."
Shield Bearer smiled
her gold covered teeth. Gold dots hung beneath her eyes, in her ears were
long pieces of green jade, interlaced with gold. Her fingernails were rounded
in jewels.
"We are the creators,"
7 Parrot said, "we parure of the earth."
Shield Bearer stroked
her husband's arm. She ran two fingers from his beak, down his feathered
chest and to the warm bulge behind a golden brooch. "Make love to me,"
she said.
III. A BIRD IN HAND
"I am Destroyer of Mountains,"
he says.
2 Leg flattens seedlings
and flowers with as much joy as he swats down insolent trees and stony crags.
With bitter tears streaming down his face, he stamps down the mountains,
so that, to others, he seems a mere monster bent on destruction, but truly
he is filled with a dream of fairness.
"Goddamn you!"
he roars at whatever rises up. When he stamps his feet, the mountain tops
crumble. Birds fly up from the roiling dust.
He chases a blue cloud
of birds northward. He screams at them, his arms flailing, but they fly
on. Lumbering northward, he sees the earth turn colors beneath his feet.
Above, the sky swirls vermilion, blue-black, suddenly turquoise. He walks.
Leagues out, 2 Leg surprises
a covey of quail. The birds erupt, skimming beside the weed entangled arms
of 2 Leg, snipping the air with their small beaks, screaming at him in terror.
He captures one. The tiny head rubs from side to side over his fingers.
Even with rough hands, 2 Leg can feel the nervous muscles and the rapid
beating of its heart. 2 Leg strokes the feathers against his coarse cheeks.
He holds the creature under his nose. He smells the sky tucked there among
the wings and sees the slowly rolling clouds move across the bird's eyes.
"It isn't fair,"
he says.
A sorrow moves across
his throat and belly like the flush of blood after breaking fast. He draws
his finger across the animal's face, stroking backward from the beak. He
rubs downward over the frail neck, the trembling wings. He caresses the
rubbery belly, then fingers the twig legs to their knotty knees.
"We should all be
alike," 2 Leg whispers.
He pinches the skull.
Fluids spill over his knuckles. He tears a wing from the body and rubs it
over his chest. He rips free the other wing and rubs it up and down his
bare legs. He pinches off the crushed head and lays it beside the wings,
then he carefully snips down the torso with the tips of his teeth.
The bird's body opens.
Fluids trickle down his forearms as he scoops the bird over his nose, eyes
and mouth. He breathes the inside of the bird. He licks deep the red cavity.
He shudders. He licks against the wet and fleshy insides and shudders. He
swallows the small organs tongued loose like pearls and cannot control his
shuddering. He slides the bird mask down to his neck and rubs the warm blood
around his throat. "Ungh," he groans.
2 Leg places the remains
over the wings and head, and rolls face down over the dissected bird. He
stands erect.
There in the north, where
the earth turns white against the sky, 2 Leg discovers how to capture birds.
He fills bushes with salt, places lime on branches and sets tar across feeders.
Once captured, they fall to his cruel investigations. Boiling the live bodies,
he discovers their methods of screaming. He sees how their bones move to
carry their plump weight; how a finger has extended to give them flight;
how hair coarsens into feathers; how the beak of a lowly lizard hides inside
each soaring bird. He sees this and breaks his finger by trying to extend
it. He coats his head with mud and allows the stinking entanglement of hair
to harden. He eats the birds' raw bones. He eats their twitching wings.
He pushes their mangled bodies into his mouth and jumps from trees to fly.
When all this causes not one bit of change,
2 Leg grabs the birds and fills their stomachs with stones. He pulls out
their feathers and covers them with grass. He removes their legs and lets
them roll in the wind like tumbleweeds. But they multiply faster than he
can kill them.
One day, 2 Leg catches
the smell of roasting flesh. He smells grease sizzling in fire and sees
birds cooking to a golden brown. There is no one around. 2 Leg approaches
and lets the smoke rise up into his face. "This is wonderful,"
he says. He closes his eyes to enjoy the precious odor of roasting flesh.
He revels in the charred flesh spit over an orange-red fire.
2 Leg shudders.
"This is fine,"
he says huskily. "Oh, this is very fine." He lifts out one of
the birds. He holds the stick in both hands like a lover's token, holding
it close to his chest, his elbows pressing into his sides, his face mooning
over the charred birds.
2 Leg rubs the side of
his face against the cooked bird. He enjoys the slipperiness of his face
as he runs a finger through the smudge of grease. "Very good,"
he says.
He inserts the entire
stick and bird into his mouth. He chews open-mouthed so the flavors permeate
his throat, his nasal passages and rise up to his eyes. Bits and pieces
fall from his lips. Bits of the wood, pieces, stick to his teeth. He shudders
and drools.
Women appear by the clearing.
2 Leg swallows what remains
in his mouth and eyes them. He feels the freshly eaten bird roaring like
poison in his stomach.
They say nothing. They
do not move.
"I am Destroyer
of Mountains," he says, but falls to the ground in pain.
The women move to stand
over him. His body convulses.
"There was a mountain
inside you," they say.
© The Raven Chronicles 1997