Outside Wild’s office, Jack hung over the edge of the wharf, inspecting routes of ingress. A bricked-over window halfway down the piling—just before the water darkened the wood—seem’d Promising. He shimmy’d down and began working his carpenter’s file between stone and mortar.
After some time, Jack had worked exactly one brick free. It was enough. Levering in a clawbar he’d nick’d from an ironworks along the way, he created enough of a passage to permit squirreling.
If small spaces had ever bother’d Jack, this one would be a test of will. Soon he was head-down, crawling through a pinhole exactly as wide as his shoulderframe, and pitch-dark.
He scraped his way down the passage, his mind Swimming with questions—What does Wild want with a Body? You can’t fence a Body. Can you?—when, all at once, the dirt-gritted brick gave way beneath him and Jack dropped into a small, high-ceilinged chamber. As his eyes adjusted, he made out one glaze at the very upper reaches. Starlight filtered in. He paced slowly around the circular perimeter, feeling along the walls for doors. On finding one, he listened for movement on the other side. Assured he was alone—he turn’d his attention again inwards to the chamber.
There was an overpowering odor. The raw scent of shit and the brassy tang of blood. They sank to the back of Jack’s throat, and he gagg’d into his hand. Shapes lay scattered across the floor. Humps of what might have been—animal matter?
Stepping gingerly around the lumps to the far side of the chamber, he came upon an arrangement of metal implements of many shapes and sizes atop stone tables. So then he was in a laboratory of sorts. There was a slab, nestled against the dripping wall at the far edge. The slab was a rough, pitted marble. Jack bent over it, peering closer.
There he spy’d a sheaf of papers, curled at the edges with splatter and the remnants of a certain quantity of gore. Jack squint’d in the starlight.
Subject was operat’d upon several hours prior. My initial observations follow.
As to general shape, the subject’s head may be compared to a smallish, inglorious Melon. The usual Chimeric slight skull deformations are expected and evidenced, with the skull protruding out over the jointure with the neck more than expected. Not noticeable except by a trained practitioner, who can easily (if the curls are parted in the back) recognize the signs of a Malformation.
As one approaches the head, it begins to take on several aspects not visible from the distance, depending especially on the point of view. From straight on, one would take the facial epidermis for a pale bark with a light mossy fur in patches. No thicker than ordinary female skin; however, a good deal more Follicular.
As I initially suspected, the genitalia are indeed outsized. Quite protuberant.
When approached from the side angle, the genitalia can be compared to the head of a miniature Saxon soldier, complete with the telltale long narrow helmet (minus the feather).
With a bit more inspection, this helmet takes on specific qualities. The helmet—really, a sort of foreskin—is a dull pinkish color, deepening to red—and projects over the neck of the genitals, concluding in a pronounced, glans-like bulb.
A great pity that this subject’s genitals are so Compromised and in between. If only the subject were male, the equivalent-sized penis would bless this subject with the largest pleasure Member known to man.
But, alas, the spout in question descends to a proper female fissure and thus the entire landscape is a vexatious confusion.
If we were to approach the genitalia from underneath, we would readily ascribe their owner to the female sex. But then, reaching the spout up top, we must grant it is much larger than would seem Reasonable and befitting of a female person.
Approaching from the side—helmet-wise, as it were—one would ascribe a tragic and insufficient maleness to the subject, outfitted with an organ that can do no more than receive—but not give—Pleasure, in the classical sense.
There have circulated in History many intriguing fantasies concerning such genital apparati. One in particular remains with me. A lady’s servant was rumored to have called her mistress’s genitalia an “Obscene Faucet,” and imagin’d that a perfumed lavender cream might seep from it when touched. She observ’d a veritable Profusion of whiskers around its base, something like a fount of close-clipped grass at the foot of a “pornographic statue.” It has been further rumor’d that this maidservant thence began a torrid love affair with her chimeric employer, and that the passion of their mutual Devotion caused her employer to release her from service if she swore to bind herself to the “obscene faucet” for life.
I am told she took the offer. Gladly, it is said! And it is further reputed that they sealed the erotick Contract by drinking deep of every Fluid that emanated from each other’s body, beginning and ending with urine—“hot, hallowed, stinking, and beautiful” (if I recall correctly).
I am told it was in fact a great love story.
But let us leave behind all these fancies. For our world offers nothing of these redemptive Possibilities.
’Tis neither man nor woman, but something in-between-ish. Absent of testes but blooming some infernally large but useless horn between the legs. Ordinarily we would term this Creature a chimera by birth, but I must consider the possibility that this in-between-ish-ness is owing to the regular ingestion of what the community of (captur’d or murder’d) freebooters refer to as “Elixir.” As directed by Wild, I speculate further that a similar elixir might be produced in London, but that its formula would of necessity be changed for expediency and profitability of production. My hypothesis is THUS both grotesque and simple. It is THIS:
That we can drastically reduce the time and labor involved in generating the elixir by—”*
Jack turn’d the sheaf over.
At which moment he heard a sound. The Thud of a boot stepping heavily onto a rug in the adjoining room.
The door began to open—
Jack dropped the papers and scudded towards the chimney, nearly losing his Footing on something hard and round. He heard a crack—felt something shatter underneath his foot— No time to investigate, though truly this item felt of animal Origin to him— He dragg’d himself back up the mouth of the chimney and hung there, breathing quickly— If he ascended, there would be the danger of grit raining down. He wedg’d his boots into cracks on either side, and hunch’d down. He did not believe he could hold this position for long. It had been stupid—marvelously stupid—to come. If Wild were to find me—
Best not to think about it.
Jack laid his head against the brick, his heart thudding.
Someone entered the room, slamming the door. At first Jack heard only muttering. Familiar muttering—Wild.
And then a jubilant, nasal voice. “We did it! We got ’im.”
Something heavy thrown on the slab.
The sound of instruments being arranged. Vials moving. Liquids splashing.
“What is this? Who is this? Get out! You idiots! You can’t even steal a dead body properly! A dead blasted body! Where’s Barnes?!”
The door slamm’d.
Bricks trembled—dirt loos’d, pour’d down—
—Jack scrambl’d upwards.
* Hello again. I hope you’ll excuse the delay. Between being on the run and getting settled in in my new surroundings—not to mention figuring out how to edit and transcribe these documents from here…Well, I hope you don’t mind the messages-in-a-bottle, as it were.
I’m afraid I can’t indulge your curiosity as far as where I am. Suffice to say that I am very far away, and I do not mean this primarily in terms of space. I am living at a different timescale. Not parallel to yours, but apart from it.
In any case, with apologies for inevitable hiccups in transcription (and who knows if you’re receiving these communiqués anyway?), I’ll continue.
First order of business: It would be so easy to just grumblingly accept the above “Instructions” as yet another tiresome addition to the baleful annals of sexology. Yes, they are typically odious. But there’s also something about them that doesn’t seem quite typical to me.
I’m referring, of course, to the romantic attribution of the descriptor “love story” to the chimera anecdote, as well as the reverence for urine as “hallowed.” Can these possibly be original to Evans’ “Instructions”?
Obviously, no.
But how to prove it?
Fortunately, where I am now, there exists a marvelous set of materials. My new friends have collected so much on us. In fact, they are archivists of us. No, not exactly archivists. I barely have the language to describe—to translate. But I must.
They are, let me say, interested in us. They are interested because, well, they were once us. Though I don’t think they consider themselves “us” anymore. They have been writing the history of this separation.
I am told there were once lively debates here about whether or not it was even worth collecting any of our histories at all. After all, what are we but the accumulation of centuries of terror? Still, they have a saying here about the past, and I am told this is what decided the matter once and for all: All history should be the history of how we exceeded our own limits.
So, yes, we are a wretched, misery-sowing people. But how curious, how beautiful we have been, as well. In our terrible past, my new friends see a different future reflected like light off broken shards.
They are archivists of this excess to ourselves. Actually, like I said, they don’t use the word “archives” here. The closest translation for archives is: “stretches.” By which they mean stretches of time, but also stretches of space. And they don’t just mean space as a place; they mean space as a practice: the way we make space in our own bodies.
To them, I think, this is history: breathing air into a previously unfelt opening.
So, then, they are Stretchologists of that air that existed in regions unknown to ourselves, our bodies and our past.
Also, the Stretches is (are?) actually a structure that exists here. A colossal library in chitin, spiderweb and glass that sprawls at the edges of the floating alleys of the central square. It hovers above the ubiquitous water on a series of thick stilts. The architecture and the location of the building are such that it captures and holds the red of the setting sun in the thatch of wicker reeds that composes its soft, seemingly infinite roof.
The entire top floor of the Stretches is devoted to the study of the History of the Senses. I frequent this level in particular, and yet I have never seen its inner edges. I do not know how far they run. Although from the outside all the floors appear the same in dimension, they say the top in fact is larger than the others—an honor bestowed on it due to the urgency of its subject matter. (This floor contains, among other things, the entire annals of one of their specialities—the field of Thermogenic Aesthetics: the study of heat as the Seventh, most ecstatic sense. Each night, when sunset comes on, my new friends stop whatever they are doing and emerge into the blazing dome of oncoming night. They let the sunset pour over them while they turn and bathe in the warm red light. Often, at this time, I am to be found at the Stretches on the top floor; I remain inside and the heat from the thatch pulses the entire reading room into a bright, hay-scented sauna. It is very nice in there, but I think I would like to go outside with the rest of them and celebrate. I am shy about this desire, but I am changing here—becoming less…hermetic. I know that I will join them soon.)
But to return to my point regarding Evans’ “Anatomy of Chimeras.”
On the top floor of the Stretches I have come across a document titled Urine Refracts Starlight with Especial Sparkliness. This document tells of a wine cellar below an aristocratic stronghold somewhere in the south of France, in which a certain wealthy rapist was said to have coveted the original papers to the sexologist Saviard’s case study of the famous “hermaphrodite” Marguerite Malause (1702). It seems he fondled them late at night, particularly the passages where Malause is forced to urinate in front of spectators to determine Malause’s “true” gender: “I made her urinate,” says Saviard, “before the gathered assembly, upon her claiming that urine did issue from two separate places; and in order to make apparent the contrary, while she urinated I did spread apart the lips of her vulva, by which means I did make the spectators see the urinary meatus from whence the flow did proceed.”
In Urine Refracts Starlight, we learn that the “CEO” (Chimera Emancipation Organization, 1977–1990, approx.) broke into this stronghold in the summer of 1983 and destroyed—or absconded with—or altered the Saviard documents in honor of the memory of Malause, who otherwise had no say over their own representation. In Urine Refracts Starlight, the tale of the CEO is told in chapters upon chapters—Reader, this book is encyclopedic!—fashioning a kind of cosmos, a galaxy, some Ovidian tome of piss:
Ch. 2, “In which our Heroine the Pleiades Showers Orion with Golden Light”;
Ch. 5, “The Highly Interesting Escapades of Triangulum’s Tawny Froth”;
and, most intriguingly: Ch. 7, “In Which Malause Became a Star in the Hydrus Constellation and the Magellanic Cloud Drinks of Her Hot Hallowed Stinking and Beautiful Piss.”
Hot, hallowed, stinking and beautiful. What am I to think but that “Hot Hallowed Stinking and Beautiful” was inserted into the Sheppard documents by the CEO as well? A radical revisioning of sexology’s prurient fascination with urine as a vector of gendered “truth.”
If so, then surely it is fair to presume that the CEO made other alterations as well. Consider that between Jack and Bess, urine is an element held in common by lovers, a medium of intimacies that connects them but—unlike the prurient gaze of the sexologists—does not expose to our view any of the lovers’ corresponding genitalia. Are these scenes original to the text or some CEO addition? Who can say!
(On urine and starlight, see also Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand [Bantam, 1984] and Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders [Magnus Books, 2012].)