The Breast (6 page)

“Nothing ‘did it.'”

“Then why in God's name am I mad?”

“But you're not. And you know that too.”

The next Sunday, when he comes to visit, I again ask my father if I am a mental patient—just to be sure—and this time he answers, “No.”

“But last week you said yes!”

“I was wrong.”

“But it's the truth!”

“It's not.”

“I'm reversing again! I've lost it now with you! I'm back where I was! I'm reversing with everyone!”

“You're not at all,” said Dr. Klinger.

“What are you doing here? This is Sunday! My father is here, not you! You're not even here!”

“I'm here. With your father. Right beside you, the two of us.”

“This is getting all crazy again! I don't want to be crazy any more! Help me! Do you hear me? Am I being heard? Help me, please! I need your help! I cannot do this alone! Help me! Lift me! Tell me only the truth! If I am a breast, where is my milk? When Claire is sucking me, where is the milk! Tell me
that!
”

“Oh, David.” It was my father, his unshaven cheek on my areola! “My son, my poor sonny.”

“Oh, Daddy, what's happened? Hold me, Poppy, please. What's really happened? Tell me, please,
why did I go mad?
”

“You didn't, darling,” he sobbed.

“Then where is my milk? Answer me! If I am a breast I would make milk! Hold milk! Swell with milk! And that is too crazy for anybody to believe! Even me! THAT SIMPLY CANNOT BE!”

But evidently it can be. Just as they are able to increase the milk yield of cows with injections of the lactogenic agent GH, the growth hormone, so it has been hypothesized that I very likely could become a milk-producing mammary gland with appropriate hormonal stimulation. If so, there must be those out in the scientific world who would jump at the chance to find out. And when I have had my fill of all this, perhaps I will give it to them. And if I am not killed in the process? If they succeed and milk begins to flow? Well, then I will know that I am indeed a wholly authentic breast—or else that I am as mad as any man has ever been.

 

 

IN THE MEANTIME fifteen months have passed—by their calendar—and I live for the moment in relative equanimity. That is, things have been worse and will be again, but for now, for now Claire still comes to visit every day, does not miss a single day, and still, for the first half of each hour, uncomplainingly and without repugnance attends to my pleasure. Converts a disgusting perversion into a kindly, thoughtful act of love. And then we talk. She is helping me with my Shakespeare studies. I have been listening of late to recordings of the tragedies. I began with the Schonbrunns' gift, Olivier in
Hamlet.
The album lay for months here in the room before I asked Mr. Brooks one morning to break the cellophane wrapper and put a record on the phonograph. (Mr. Brooks turns out to be a Negro; and so, in my mind's eye—a breast's mind's eye, to be sure—I imagine him looking like the handsome black Senator from Massachusetts. Why not, if it makes This cozier for me?) Like so many people, I have been meaning ever since college to sit down someday and reread Shakespeare. I may even once have said as much to Debbie Schonbrunn, and she bought the record album because she realized that I now had the time. Surely no satire was ever intended, however much I may have believed otherwise when the
Hamlet
arrived the week after Arthur's three-minute visit. I must remember that aside from the more obvious difficulties occasioned by my transformation, I am no longer the easiest person in the world to buy a present for.

For several hours every morning and again sometimes in the afternoons when there is nothing better to do, I listen to my Shakespeare records: Olivier playing Hamlet and Othello, Paul Scofield as Lear,
Macbeth
as performed by the Old Vic company. Unable to follow with a text while the play is being spoken, I invariably miss the meaning of an unfamiliar word or lose my way in the convoluted syntax. Then my mind begins to wander, and when I tune in again, little makes sense for lines on end. Despite the effort—oh, the effort, minute-by-minute this effort!—to keep my attention fixed on the plight of Shakespeare's suffering heroes, I do continue to consider my own suffering more than can be good for me.

The Shakespeare edition I used in college—Neilson and Hill,
The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare,
bound in blue linen, worn at the spine by my earnest undergraduate grip, and heavily underlined by me then for wisdom—is on the table beside the hammock. It is one of several books I have asked Claire to bring from my apartment. I remember exactly what it looks like, which is why I wanted it here. In the evenings, during the second half hour of her visit, Claire looks up for me in the footnotes words whose usage I long ago learned and forgot; or she will slowly read aloud some passage that I missed that morning when my mind departed Elsinore Castle for Lenox Hill Hospital. It seems to me important to get these passages clear in my head—my brain—before I go off to sleep. Otherwise it might begin to seem that I listen to
Hamlet
for the same reason that my father answers the phone at my Uncle Larry's catering establishment—to kill time.

Olivier is a great man, you know. I have fallen in love with him a little, like a schoolgirl with a movie star. I've never before given myself over to a genius so completely, not even while reading. As a student, as a professor, I experienced literature as something unavoidably tainted by my self-consciousness and all the responsibilities of serious discourse; either I was learning or I was teaching. But responsibilities are behind me now; at last I can just listen.

In the beginning I used to try to amuse myself when I was alone in the evenings by imitating Olivier. I worked with my records during the day to memorize the famous soliloquies, and then I performed for myself at night, trying to approximate his distinctive delivery. After some weeks it seemed to me that I had really rather mastered his Othello, and one night, after Claire had left, I did the death-scene speech with such plaintive passion that I thought I could have moved an audience to tears. Until I realized that I had an audience. It was midnight, or thereabouts, but nobody has given me a good reason yet why the TV camera should shut down at any hour of the day or night—and so I left off with my performance. Enough pathos is enough, if not, generally, too much. “Come now, David,” said I to myself, “it is all too poignant and heartbreaking, a breast reciting ‘And say besides, that in Aleppo once…' You will send the night shift home in tears.” Yes, bitterness, dear reader, and of the shallow sort, but then permit my poor professorial dignity a little rest, won't you? This is not tragedy any more than it is farce. It is only life, and I am only human.

Did
fiction do this to me? “How could it have?” asks Dr. Klinger. “No, hormones are hormones and art is art. You are not suffering from an overdose of the great imaginations.” “Aren't I? I wonder. This might well be my way of being a Kafka, being a Gogol, being a Swift. They could envision the incredible, they had the words and those relentless fictionizing brains. But I had neither, I had nothing—literary longings and that was it. I loved the extreme in literature, idolized those who wrote it, was virtually hypnotized by the imagery and the power—” “And? Yes? The world is full of art lovers—so?” “So I took the leap. Made the word flesh. Don't you see, I have out-Kafkaed Kafka.” Klinger laughed, as though I meant only to be amusing. “After all,” I said, “who is the greater artist, he who imagines the marvelous transformation, or he who marvelously transforms himself? Why David Kepesh? Why me, of all people, endowed with such powers? Simple. Why Kafka? Why Gogol? Why Swift? Why anyone? Great art happens to people like anything else. And this is my great work of art! Ah,” but I quickly added, “I must maintain my sane and reasonable perspective. I don't wish to upset you again. No delusions—delusions of grandeur least of all.”

But if not grandeur, what about abasement? What about depravity and vice? I could be rich, you know, I could be rich, notorious, and delirious with pleasure every waking hour of the day. I think about it more and more. I could call my friend to visit me, the adventurous younger colleague I spoke of earlier. If I haven't dared to invite him yet, it isn't because I'm frightened that he'll laugh and run like Arthur Schonbrunn, but rather that he'll take one look at what I am—and what I could be—and be all too eager to help; that when I tell him I have had just about enough of being a heroically civilized fellow about it all, enough of listening to Olivier and talking to my analyst and enjoying thirty minutes every day of some virtuous schoolteacher's idea of hot sex, he won't argue the way others would. “I want to get out of here,” I'll say to him, “and I need an accomplice. We can carry with us all the pumps and pipes that sustain me. And to look after my health, such as it is, we can hire doctors and nurses to come along—money will be no problem. But I am sick and tired of worrying about losing Claire. Let her go and find a new lover whose sperm she will not drink, and lead with him a normal and productive life. I am tired of guarding against the loss of her angelic goodness. And between the two of us, a little tired of my old man too—he bores me. And, really, how much more Shakespeare do you think I can take? I wonder if you realize how many of the great plays of Western literature are now available on excellent long-playing records. When I finish with Shakespeare, I can go right on to first-rate performances of Sophocles, Sheridan, Aristophanes, Shaw, Racine—but to what end? To what end! That
is
killing time. For a breast it is the bloody
murder
of time. Pal, I am going to make a pot of money. I don't think it should be difficult, either. If the Beatles can fill Shea Stadium, why can't I? We will have to think this through, you and I, but then what was all that education for, if not to learn to think things through? To read more books? To write more critical essays? Further contemplation of the higher things? How about some contemplation of the lower? I will make hundreds of thousands of dollars—and then I will have girls, twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls, three, four, and five at a time, naked and giggling, and all on my nipple at once. I want them for days on end, greedy wicked little girls, licking me and sucking me to my heart's content. And we can find them, you know that. If the Rolling Stones can find them, if Charles Manson can find them, then with all our education we can probably find a few ourselves. And women. There will also be women eager to open their thighs to a cock as new and thrilling as my nipple. I think we will be happily surprised by the number of respectable women who will come knocking at the dressing-room door in their respectable chinchillas just to get a peek at the tint of my soft hermaphroditic flesh. Well, we will have to be discriminating, won't we, we will have to select from among them according to beauty, good breeding, and lewd desire. And I will be deliriously happy.
And I will be deliriously happy.
Remember Gulliver among the Brobdingnags? How the maid-servants had him strolling out on their nipples for the fun of it? He didn't think it was fun, poor lost little man. But then he was a humane English physician, a child of the Age of Reason, a faithful follower of the Sense of Proportion trapped on a continent of outlandish giants; but this, my friend and accomplice, is the Land of Opportunity, this is the Age of Self-Fulfillment, and I am the Breast, and will live by my own lights!”

“Live by them or die by them?”

“It remains to be seen, Dr. Klinger.”

Permit me now to conclude my lecture by quoting the poet Rilke. As a passionately well-meaning literature teacher I was always fond of ending the hour with something moving for the students to carry from the uncontaminated classroom out into the fallen world of junk food and pop stars and dope. True, Kepesh's occupation's gone—
Othello,
Act III, Scene 3—but I haven't lost entirely a teacher's good intentions. Maybe I haven't even lost my students. On the basis of my fame, I may even have acquired vast new flocks of undergraduate sheep, as innocent of calamity as of verse. I may even be a pop star now myself and have just what it takes to bring great poetry to the people.

(“Your fame?” says Dr. Klinger. “Surely the world knows by now,” I say, “excepting perhaps the Russians and Chinese.” “In accordance with your wishes, the case has been handled with the utmost discretion.” “But my friends know. The staff here knows. That's enough of a start for something like this.” “True. But by the time the news filters beyond those who know and out to the man in the street, he tends by and large not to believe it.” “He thinks it's a joke.” “If he can take his mind off his own troubles long enough to think anything at all.” “And the media? You're suggesting they've done nothing with this either?” “Nothing at all.” “I don't buy that, Dr. Klinger.” “Don't. I'm not going to argue. I told you long ago—there of course were inquiries in the beginning. But nothing was done to assist anyone, and after a while these people have a living to make like everybody else, and they move right along to the next promising misfortune.” “Then no one knows all that's happened.” “All? No one but you knows it all, Mr. Kepesh.” “Well, maybe I should be the one to tell all then.” “Then you
will
be famous, won't you?” “Better the truth than tabloid fantasy. Better from me than from the chattering madmen and morons.” “Of course the madmen and the morons will chatter anyway, you know. You realize that you will never be taken on your own terms, regardless of what you say.” “I'll still be a joke.” “A joke. A freak. If you insist on being the one to tell them, a charlatan too.” “You're advising me to leave well enough alone. You're advising me to keep this all to myself.” “I'm advising you nothing, only reminding you of our friend with the beard who sits on the throne.” “Mr. Reality.” “And his principle,” says Klinger.)