Many years ago—twenty-five at the time I write this—I had a story called Vivisection published in a small, Alberta magazine called blue buffalo. Sometimes I like it, and sometimes I don’t. It depends on the weather, I suppose. For whatever it’s worth, here it is:
Vivisection
I can’t see Roger’s face. His head is bent over the keyboard and his hair falls down hiding any identity. I see only the gentle bobbing of the cranium and the tap dance of the fingers…
Sorry.
Jessica looks up and scowls at me. She knows I’ve done something wrong—she can tell by how I’ve jerked. But she doesn’t know what it was and therefore can’t scold me.
Roger wants me out of the group. I don’t belong, he says. Leaving might be a good idea but it’s winter and cold and, outside, the ice (from freezing rain) has left our house encased like a corporate logo in plastic. Perhaps we dangle from someone’s keychain.
Jessica defends me but as each day passes she finds me harder and harder to justify. I do my best but it may be that Roger is right. No matter how hard I try, I keep finding myself reaching for metaphors and similes, adjectives and adverbs. Somewhere in this multiplicity of genes, in those twenty-three chromosome groupings, there lives a demon who…
Jessica looks up and scowls. Roger’s oblivious. He can’t see past his hair.
* * *
We write because we cannot talk; we talk because we cannot write. Like a car stalled on a freeway we can neither move on nor get off. (Sorry.)
I appear to be alone in this opinion. Roger and Jessica don’t share it and as for Jeremy…who knows? I don’t think he has an opinion. He follows Roger’s lead the way a dog…
Ouch. This time they know. Jessica has passed by and seen, “…the way a dog…” on my screen. With suburban smugness she has told Roger. He smiles thinly and says, “That’s all right.”
This means trouble.
“Today I think it’s Wendy’s turn.”
Oh my. Roger is a prick. He’s decided it’s my turn for vivisection and it’s not fair. I’m sure Jessica has missed a turn.
Meekly—Sorry!—I lay down on the kitchen’s linoleum. It’s always the kitchen floor because it’s linoleum. No one wants blood to damage the hardwood floors of the other rooms—they must “keep their natural look.” But how natural is a piece of stained wood, a piece taken from a tree, cut and planed and sanded? They don’t grow that way.
Roger (it’s always Roger) takes the knife and splits me down the middle. Everyone gathers around to gaze at the inner me. Almost immediately Roger is writing, describing in as plain and distant a manner as he can what is to found there.
Jessica hesitates then, picking up the knife, with difficult removes my left arm. She has always had a thing for arms—for ganglia, actually. She places it before her keyboard then she, too, starts to write.
Jeremy (whom I suspect of us all is the real thing) prefers to take my blouse. He hangs it over a lamp then stares at it as his small finger squirms within his nose. Then, he too begins to write.
As for me, I gaze forward at my exposed ribs. I hate this. I hate all of this. I’ve no interest in my viscera and so I write (and read aloud at the top of my voice): “The vagina is not passive! It cries out for interdiction!”
Everybody stops.
“Wendy?” Jessica asks. She looks puzzled.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Roger is angry. Less, I think, with what I’ve said than with how I’ve said it. There was an emotional stridency in my voice—the sentences ended with exclamation marks.
“I don’t know what it means,” I say truthfully. (Vagueness is my greatest artistic weakness.) “But it was something that needed to be said.”
Jeremy has stopped writing and his face is as red as a fire victim’s. He’s embarrassed and perspiring somewhat. Suspicious, Roger and Jessica glance at one another. They step over to where Jeremy sits and Roger, touching the keyboard, prints what has been written. As the printer clacks Jessica goes to the lamp and removes the possible catalyst. She tosses the shirt over to me as Roger lifts the paper from the printer. I see only the first few words.
“The spiritless blouse embraced the skeletal stand in a strange union of disparate things. Longing had…”
Roger takes the paper and pins it to the wall as Jessica looks on in mute disgust. Jeremy’s head is bent like Roger’s earlier, but his is in shame and not concentration.
Dispassionately (how else?), Roger lectures Jeremy. As he does, words fall from the paper to the linoleum floor, on me and around me. Slowly, the sheet becomes clean, white like the world outside the windows. I see my cherished adverbs and adjectives descend like unskilled balloonists, landing only to become refugees in an unrecognizable country. The metaphors and similes drop like loosed feathers, their birds flying off as they spin to the earth softly, alone. Soon, the paper is almost blank, only a few pronouns and verbs mar the white sheet. Jeremy, who now is looking back up, also seems more blank, distant and chilly like Roger, like the ice that surrounds the little house.
For the first time I notice that there is no density to either Roger or Jessica. They are like song phrases dimly remembered. I detect this thing I hadn’t before because Jeremy is losing his solidity too. Roger sees this and quickly orders him to the floor. I see, now, why I was chosen and why Jeremy must be taken apart and studied quickly. Soon there will be nothing left of him to dissect. Soon he will be like a homeless ghost drifting pointlessly through his days, cut adrift from the mooring of his body.
Roger slices into Jeremy. “What does it mean?” he mutters and I realize it’s a question he often asks.
What does it mean? Something and nothing; something, but nothing of importance. It means I cannot see your face, Roger—just as I can’t see the skin gloving my hand, only the bones. They, too, are losing density, becoming nothing.
It’s too late for Jeremy. Already, he’s gone. He is here, like Roger and Jessica, but gone, surrounded by discarded words from his now blank paper.
Blank like his once furtive, soft face.
(Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.)
* * *
Feeling is gone from my fingers and toes. The extremities are there but not there. I can’t see them yet something touches the keys of the keyboard. I want to find a simile, a metaphor, something that will give an inkling of what this feeling is. But my brain is blank. I can only find a memory of Jeremy’s face. I will write about that face soon. Soon, we all will.
I am almost transparent now. Roger and Jessica are almost transparent too. They always have been. I wonder if my hair falls and covers my face as I write.
Jeremy, of course, is gone. Once he began to go, he couldn’t stop it. Roger could; so could Jessica. I stopped too. The three of us remain in the in-between place of something and nothing; something, but nothing of importance. Jeremy couldn’t stop. He had to go straight through, fade into whatever is beyond something, but nothing of importance, to the true nothing.
He was never one for compromise no matter how self-effacing he was.
* * *
It is still cold outside. Through the window, I see only white. It is a blank day, as all days are now.
Roger no longer wants me out of the group. Jessica doesn’t feel the need to justify me anymore, either. The troubled look she used to get because of my words is gone. Perhaps that look is with Jeremy now, wherever that might be.
For me, everything is peaceful. Everything is serene. There are no more apologies to be made.
Tomorrow I think I will start my novel.
— THE END —
Published in blue buffalo
Spring 1993, Number 11:1
About blue buffalo
The Literary History of Alberta – Volume Two
From the End of the War to the End of the Century
by George Melnyk
“In 1982, Dandelion (magazine) started a new publication under the name Blue Buffalo, first as a supplement and then as an independent publication of the Dandelion Magazine Society. Blue Buffalo was devoted exclusively to Alberta writing. The editors of the first issue were three Calgary poets: Murdoch Burnett, Claire Harris, and Robert Hilles. The magazine had a collective editorial structure and presented poetry in an attractively designed, larger-format publication. In the 1990s, the magazine converted to a tabloid format and added a stronger visual component to its design values. It also began to include more fiction. As ‘a magazine of recent Alberta writing,’ it provided both recognized and new writers and poets a venue where the literary and artistic could meet. It closed in the mid 1990s.”
