The Tongue's Cat
(A Dissection in Thirteen Incisions)
Jeffrey M. Bockman
"Lernen wir traumen, meinen Herren, darin finden wir vielleicht
die Wahrheit." * August Kekulé
ON THE NIGHT OF THE DAY THAT SOPHIA TURNED SIX, AS SHE SLEPT FULL OF
DEVIL'S FOOD CAKE with butter cream frosting dotted with miniature
ornaments of sugar and silver, she dreamed that something in her closet
whispered to her, something that swayed back and forth on a wooden hanger,
swayed into a dimly moonlit rectangle and then back into darkness, never
more than a shadow; and perhaps a shiny button flared, or a tin box
glinted on the shelf, and one could just barely, in the absolute stillness
of that room, hear that special sound that hangers make when they knock
against each other, wood on plastic, plastic on wire; and what was
whispered she remembered when she awoke and took to heart as if she had
been bestowed with a special secret: Men are animals.
Sophia opened her eyes to the light streaming through the uncurtained
bay windows, a brilliant light scattered into miniature rainbows by the
beveled and wintry glass. She tumbled out of her unshared bunk bed and
scraped across the hardwood floor in her footed Babar pajamas to her
dressing closet, dragging her oversized stuffed Dalmatian behind her.
When every dress, skirt and blouse lay strewn on the floor of the bedroom
and every reachable box was piled with lids ajar and sundry toys and games
and abandoned gifts spilling out, including the latest packages from her
mother (a stuffed owl pillow, a miniature Tales of Beatrix Potter, a green
chalkboard), the closet was left definitively empty and still. Except for
the swaying hangers, tinkling softly like chimes.
I.
Dr. Jecks rested his latex-gloved hand on the cold glass of the bell
jar as he watched the last breaths of Calpurnia condense on the inside.
For a moment he caught a small, distorted view of himself, his almost too
finely sculpted features rendered more humanely imperfect--as if he
himself had carved and hollowed, shifted fatty deposits, fractured and
re-grafted bone. Calpurnia was barely visible through the thick white fog
which bubbled up from the chunk of dry ice sitting in a cat-dish of water.
Yawning reflexively, she slid into terminal sleep. Working swiftly, he
dipped the cat in a bucket of Lysol and then pinned it down on the
diapered cork board, sprawled on her belly like a flying squirrel.
Gripping the eye sockets with a rat-toothed forceps he cut through the
tissue at the nape of the neck and then, switching to a six inch iris
scissors, he snipped in opposing arcs through the bone and flipped open
the skull like the hood of a car. With his left hand he scooped up the
cat's brain and placed it gently on a polystyrene cutting board. Deftly
slicing several pieces of tissue from various regions of the brain, he
dropped these into individually numbered vials of fixative. He then
carefully slipped the brain into a half-quart piece of Tupperware.
Removing his bloodied gloves, he placed on the lid, burped it according to
instructions, and carried it to the -20°C freezer in the garage. Before
storing it away, he labeled the container with blue tape, printing with an
indelible black fine point Sharpie the cat's name and the date of
sacrifice. He placed it between a red-labeled container and the herb and
port wine sorbet.
The tape was color-coded: blue for cats, red for dogs. The yellow,
orange, green, pink, and white tape had yet to be used.
II.
Another of the neighbors' animals had disappeared. "It's getting to
be like the Bermuda Triangle around here," said a churlish old man in
slippers to the paperboy, whose own dog Teddy, an otherwise sedentary pet,
had disappeared a month before. The five dollars with tip fluttered to
the porch. "Here's your hat, what's your hurry," he mumbled to the
fleeing boy as he stooped to gather up his money.
III.
The Home was a beautifully gabled, white meringue Victorian with lemon
curd trimmings, sitting atop an historical grassy knoll at the far western
edge of Stalanep Valley. From her dormer window Sophia could look out
across the entire town, and would on occasion think of herself as a maiden
ensconced within the turret of a castle, like Rapunzel.
In the early settler days the knoll had been covered with wild
grasses a foot tall, where flustered teenagers would beat down a hiding
place for their first awkward trysts. Later, a fine colonial mansion
surrounded by a grove of imported cherry trees had been built by a
respectable captain home from the sea, retired from his profitable
particularity--his being the necessary and sufficient means of transport
in the economic triangulation of rum and sugar cane and young Nubian
girls. In fact, he had returned with several souvenirs of the last, which
ample gift-giving of the former had quelled the gossiping over. After the
captain drowned in a fire which scuttled his mansion, having taken refuge
in a huge Venetian bathtub in which he was overcome by smoke, the
property, being without legitimate heirs, passed to the township, which
deeded it to the First Congregational Church under the pastorate of the
Venerable Thomas Andrew Harvard, who led its flock nobly for twenty years,
ably assisted by his wife, the former Abigail Warley of Worcester,
England, who played admirably her prized Gainsborough spinet (specially
designed for her in London, since one of her legs was shorter than the
other). When the Reverend and a local lady of the evening were found
outside the church one Sunday morning slumped beneath a cherry tree,
bedecked with blossoms and the torn love letters of the past fifteen
years, which had themselves taken on a certain blossom-like hue from the
blood, the church found itself without a shepherd. And for that matter,
without the lopsided widow Abigail and her spinet, both of which had
disappeared. The old saltbox church stood decaying for many years,
haunted more by morality than specters, the brandished example and bane of
every youth who strayed from the path of respectability, until a wealthy
big city lawyer bought it up at the turn of the century. He tore down the
prim and proper church and raised the fancy gingerbread Victorian as his
summer home. In the cherry grove he built a replica of the home as a
playhouse for his six year old daughter, exact down to the miniature copy
of a Louis XIV commode, which resided in the master bedrooms of both
dwellings. He brought his daughter Beatrice and invalid wife Constance to
these houses each June through September, and while the wife breathed in
the fresh country air the two of them, father and daughter, enjoyed
drinking lemonade on the porch while quietly watching the stars, and
bicycle trips into town for ice cream sodas, and increasingly mature
conversations on their ever longer evening walks amidst the still
plentiful tall grasses and fireflies. The man never returned after
Beatrice was found hanging from one of the cherry trees on the night of
her sixteenth birthday, having stood on and toppled the chimney of the
playhouse. After overseeing the razing of the entire grove by a
sympathetic and well-paid corps of local men, he departed the next day
with Constance, who never spoke another word until her death almost
exactly a year later. The house, however, remained well-kept until Mr.
Heidt's death at 96, when, as stipulated in his will, it was endowed as a
home for disturbed girls. In the family's tomb in a cemetery outside of
Boston one can still see the crumbling remains, when the sun illuminates
them in the early morning, of Beatrice's playhouse.
And so it was from the window of this house that Sophia would stare
out across the Valley, feeling like Rapunzel, except that she had no hair
to let down through the sealed window--it was just now beginning to grow
back from her shaven scalp and, in any event, the pane was made of
unbreakable safety glass.
IV.
"A white lady whispered to me," Sophia weakly proclaimed to her latest
au pair, Jutta, who discovered her sitting amidst the strewn contents of
her closet. The young woman stood momentarily paralyzed with fear.
Sophia's green eyes were sunken this morning, lost within the dark circles
which were so apparent against her pale skin. Her mother's pendant, a
family heirloom, was ensnared in her tousled hair. A few black strands
were stuck against her damp lips. Jutta rushed to her and scooped her up
in her arms. Carrying her back to the bottom bunk, she knocked against
the night stand, spilling a half-empty glass of water. The medicinal
blue-tinged liquid trickled down a whorled leg and, channeled by the seams
in the parquet, puddled at the head of the bed. "You've had a bad
nightmare, haven't you, dear," whispered Jutta into her ear, kissing her
cheek and then gently disentangling the pedant from her hair. By the time
the pendant was free she was sound asleep. Jutta shivered. She recalled
her mythology classes at the gymnasium and the tales of the White Ladies,
who received the souls of maidens and young children. Why are there no
curtains here, she thought suddenly, angrily, looking out the bay windows
into the bright cold sun. She turned back to Sophia and stared at her
illuminated, tranquil face. The pendant glowed from the hollow of her
neck, a woman's head of white coral being pulled from both sides by golden
hoops, which were grasped by clenched fists of turquoise. She tucked the
blankets up under Sophia's chin and walked over to the closet. She knelt
down and picked up a small chalkboard. A half-erased sentence was still
visible: Men are animals. Jutta began to shake.
V.
What I wish, by sophia jecks
If I wasn't a girl I'd be a boy cause boys can have fur and sharp
teeth and they can have wings and get away or be a fish with a sword on
their head. Boys don't have to go to bed early and aren't scared of the
hall at night. Boys can pee standing up like animals and it doesn't hurt
them at all.
VI.
Dr. Jecks stared out his home office window, across the green expanse
of lawn towards the valley's low western hills which were just now showing
traces of autumn color. He could just make out the roof of the Beatrice
Heidt House, peeking out from above the Norway Maples that the city had
graciously planted to replace the cherry trees. The receiver clutched in
his hand drifted away from his ear with a disembodied slowness. "I've
exhausted the somatic and psychosomatic possibilities," he emphasized into
the phone, jerking it back suddenly. Folding and refolding a piece of
pink labeling tape into smaller and smaller squares, his frustration
buzzed back to him from the receiver in electrostatic echoes. He ran
through a mantra of considered and discarded hypotheses: she is not deaf,
she does not have receptive aphasia--she hears me, understands me,
occasionally even reacts to me; her mnesis, gnosis, and praxis are
intact; she does not appear by the full battery of invasive and
non-invasive procedures to have any identifiable lesions in the brain, nor
are her chemical profiles abnormal--she is not lost in oneirophrenia, she
is not depressive nor does she display signs of some unusual adult-onset
autism..." Dr. Jecks sat down and slumped back into his black leather
armchair, the black phone resting in his white-gowned lap. On his chest
was a fluttering of red butterflies, where he had wiped his gloves. "...oh
yea, baby, that's it, yea, mmm...To listen to another hot and nasty little
girl, please push the pound button now..." Slamming the receiver down, he
lept up to his private operating table and peered down into the
blood-filled hollow of the rabbit's skull. Lacustrine and still, he
remembered from some long-forgotten poem.
He thought of a winter at Lago de Como, where he and his wife had gone
when Sophia was four. It was just before Christmas and the main street of
shops was lined with a red carpet, and draped above from the inward
leaning buildings on either side was a thick bough of branches hung with
crystal balls which caught the yellow and amber lights from the bustling
stores. There had been few tourists at the pensione--just an old Italian
couple from Naples visiting D'Annunzio's estate, and themselves. One
early evening, when they were all resting by the common fire after a long
day of shopping, he had gone off exploring the inn. In a little alcove
for the phone the years of preceding guests had left an assortment of
books in a dozen languages piled up haphazardly on a single shelf. He had
found a copy of Alice in Wonderland, which, he distinctly remembered, was
solidly lodged in the middle of a tall and precarious stack, between a
German translation of The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea and
L'Alchimie et les Alchimistes. Like a magician pulling a tablecloth
from beneath the set banquet--or like a surgeon removing an epileptic
lesion from the brain--he had deftly snatched the book without disturbing
the tower of words. Returning, he had sat beside his wife, with Sophia on
his lap, and read aloud to them the entire book.
Shaking off his reverie, Dr. Jecks picked up the tape dispenser and
pulled off a strip of white from the collection of colors. "No, no, no,
this is not right, this is not it--it is not a matter of history but
science, an exact and exacting science, a solitary science, a science of
resilience, of being deaf to the narrowness and the calumnies of
colleagues and friends, a science of pursuit, the elusive and mocked path
to truth. Secure in the intuition of science, guided by my dream like
Kekulé was by his, I take arms against drudging dogma and the catatonic
canon!" With this final rhetorical flourish he brandished the disposable
scalpel, which would have sprinkled a pretty galaxy of stars across the
rug if the blood had not already dried. Dr. Jecks tossed the scalpel into
the sharps container and reached into a styrofoam cooler beside the body,
from which he pulled out the now frozen brain. Dropping it into its
appropriately labeled container, he lamented to the splayed rabbit: "No
tea party for you I'm afraid."
VII.
"Now Sophia, I don't want to keep sitting here listening to myself
talk. I brought you a tape recorder--inspired more by Equus than by
Harvard, I might add. And a pen and paper--a pen, which I might emphasize
again, is my own personal favorite--you'll see that I'm taking notes
here--or rather, not taking notes--with a lousy office supply catalogue
pen which leaves little red spots on my fingertip like a rash--a pen, I
was saying, which is just like that used on the space shuttles--writes
upside down, under water, in extreme cold or heat." Dr. Gardner stopped
and observed Sophia scratching invisibly on the formica desktop. Sophia
looked up at her silence and smiled. "Perhaps if I instructed the staff
not to clean this room for a few weeks you'd have a nice layer in which to
leave your mark." Dr. Gardner's sarcasm, although not generally
conscienced by her colleagues, particularly her former colleagues in
Boston, was a welcome relief to Sophia after the stuffy hospitals in the
city and the even stuffier doctors. She noticed Sophia staring at her
left hand, which was casually spooling several locks of blonde hair.
"Just because I'm a psychologist doesn't mean I'm free from habits, ticks,
or compulsions. Or traumas, for that matter." Dr. Gardner finished this
sentence with a pointed stare into Sophia's green eyes. Sophia returned
to scratching her unseen sentences, but this time she traced her secrets
on her right forearm, leaving white letters becoming red on pale skin.
Removing the pen she had been chewing on from her mouth, Dr. Gardner
glanced at her watch and then flicked it with her forefinger. "Dammit.
Well, I'm glad we had this time together, catching up on old times."
Sophia looked up and watched as Dr. Gardner, scowling, uncrossed her legs
and rose to leave. She looks more like Rapunzel, she thought, with golden
tresses and coral lips, and eyes as blue as the azure sky of deepest
summer. And I am the Doctor's broken clock--I keep on ticking but I can't
seem to talk.
VIII.
Sophia is dreaming of a stairwell flooded with light and a young girl
with bobbed blonde hair, standing with a sandwiche bag in her outstretched
hand, full of something squishy and dark. Sophia is standing on a landing
between floors, wearing only a t-shirt and white underwear with red
butterflies. And there's a little boy three stairs up who keeps on asking
her to remove her t-shirt. She throws it on the cold marble floor and he
begins to pee onto it. The girl with the baggy moves closer. Look, she
says, you can have this. And then suddenly Sophia is in a cornfield, she
and a boy and another girl, and the green cornstalks are twice as high as
they are and they're hidden amidst the rows. She knows the two are
brother and sister, and that the girl is deaf. She watches as the brother
pulls down his sister's skirt and underwear. Her vagina is scarlet and
she rocks back and forth making nasal sounds between moans and words.
Sophia runs and runs until she comes to a forest with a secret path, the
boys' path, and she runs through the bushes and vines and branches and
scratches herself on thorns and stains herself with blackberries and the
middle of the forest is cleared and night has fallen and the boys have a
fire. They are naked, going to the bathroom and wiping themselves with
leaves, laughing and offering them to her, but she knows they're poison
oak, and they're surrounding her and jumping up and down and their little
boy penises are flopping and she wants to laugh but she knows that if she
does, if she does....Instead she lunges through the circle of boys into
the fire, and then out the other side. She looks like a comet as she
crosses back and forth across the darkened fields, her long hair trailing
behind her ablaze, leaving a scrawled declaration in the fiery grass
before she lifts off the ground to join the owls and other solitary wise
creatures in the evening sky.
IX.
Having embedded the fixed pieces of tissue from each species in
paraffin, Dr. Jecks sectioned the dice-sized cubes of wax at a thickness
of seven microns, affixed them to slides brushed with egg white, and then
stained and counterstained them with hematoxylin and eosin. As he peered
through the microscope at the surreal cellular landscape of purple and
pink, he succumbed briefly to the possible futility of his project,
likening it to a spy satellite's scanning the surface of the earth for a
particular misplaced needle. Slumping down in his seat he grew pallid and
his body was convulsed shivers. An image of himself and Sophia flashed
through his mind, of when she was three or four and he would pretend to be
a cat, pursing his lips together and purring as he lifted her shirt and
rubbed his head against her belly, making her laugh. Forcing himself to
hyperventilate through his clenched teeth, he straightened up and dug his
fingernails deeply into his palms. The shaking subsided and he was
quickly back at the ocular, dialing the fine focus up and down as he began
his rigorous assessment of the sizes and shapes of organelles, the
dispursement of cell types, on guard for the appearance of unusual
structures which could be indications of the pathology for which he sought
the key. As Kekulé's dream of the tail-eating serpent, the alchemist's
ouroboros, led him to solve the riddle of benzene, so I am guided by a
dream to solve Sophia's silence, Dr. Jecks mused, scribbling a note in his
laboratory notebook concerning slide three, cricetid medulla.
X.
"Marian Gardner." She listened to the silence at the other end of the
phone, and then a dial tone. She buzzed her receptionist, who said that
it had been a man calling himself Dr. August, who claimed to be
collaborating with Dr. Gardner on a case. "Now if he calls again, John,
put him on hold and buzz me first. I don't know any Dr. August." She
returned to her casebook and began chewing on the end of her red pen. The
book was full of Sophia's history, as culled from interviews with family
and friends, teachers and other doctors, covering her life from before she
stopped speaking at thirteen until the present, nearly sixteen years old.
Since she refused to even write down any responses to questions, all her
previous doctors, since she tested fine physically, had considered the
case hopeless--one born of some latent childhood trauma or extreme
willfulness, but likely to resolve of its own accord in either case given
time, unless one wanted to try drugs, but her father had been adamant in
his refusal to allow such treatments. Still, Dr. Gardner was not
satisfied with this passive diagnosis and prognosis. She could tell it in
her eyes. Sophia wanted someone to figure her out, and whether her
silence was psychosomatic or stubbornly symbolic was irrelevant. There
was some real trauma, of that she was certain, even if her certainty
derived from something akin to intuition. What was it Nabokov said,
Marian thought, something about the precision of poetry and the intuition
of science. Returning to her notes she suddenly realized the one glaring
gap in the record, aside from Sophia--the au pairs.
XI.
Sophia could make out her house much more easily now that the trees
were bare. The only stone house in Stalanep Valley. In the heat of
summer you could refresh yourself just by pressing an inflamed cheek
against the cool walls. They had never needed air-conditioning. This
place, however, it was like being in the perfectly controlled environment
of a museum, temperature and humidity and light adjusted to best preserve
the specimen for study. And now she had missed the smell of burning
leaves again. They must have really refurbished this place to insulate it
so well that not the slightest scent of the outer world could enter. She
pictured the leaves raked into great piles in everyone's yard. Then
apples piled high in barrels and their cidery smell. And now another
birthday. Someone could have piled the leaves dangerously close to a
house. Everyone away on the entire block, at work, shopping, picking kids
up from school, except him, sitting in his study, reading about strange
disorders, diseases with exotic names like Munchhausen's Syndrome, the
shelves alphabetized by specialty and sub-specialty, pulling down another
tome, smelling the burning leaves, never suspecting...Sophia pulled over a
chair and stood up on it. She leaned her full weight against the window,
her face pressed up against the cold wintry glass.
XII.
Adding two microliters of the suspension of cat brain to the reaction
vial, Dr. Jecks watched impatiently for the appearance of yellow, its rate
of development indicative of the level of activity of a neuronal enzyme.
Perhaps there was some form of organo-phosphorous poisoning, some
insecticide that a careless gardener was spraying to protect a vain
neighbor's apple trees, that had infiltrated the water supply. Perhaps
Sophia had been stealing these apples at night and eating them without
washing, as teenagers will do. He would have to ask the former owners if
their pets, before they disappeared, had displayed any unusual symptoms
such as loss of appetite or muteness.
XIII.
"I have a present for you Sophia," Dr. Gardner announced as she
entered her room. Sophia did not turn around but continued to stand and
stare out the window. "Don't you want it? If you only knew what I went
through to find just the right gift. And I'm sure its the right gift,
too. Pretty humble, aren't I. Alright, you don't have to open it, though
I wish you could have admired my wrapping job--it took me almost as long
as it did to write my dissertation--so I'll just unwrap it for you. Nice
paper, based on the drawings of Beatrix Potter." Sophia spread her hands
out against the pane. "Why, what do we have here. Isn't this cute, a
chalkboard and chalk." Sophia dropped her hands to her sides and turned.
"Happy sixteenth birthday, Sophia."
(* "Let us learn to dream, Gentlemen, and then we may perhaps find
the truth.")
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