It’s pitch dark but I can see the scene as if it were lit up by stage lights, smell the smells: her lips slightly metallic, copper, I’d say, with notes of clove and newborn galaxy.
It’s only when the car is almost upon them that they unclutch. So taken are they by their grappling that they don’t even hear it; they could have been run over. And the weird thing is, I didn’t see it coming either. It’s extremely rare that something takes me by surprise, and it feels very peculiar. Their brains are pumped with dopamine and the other sex hormones, the worst drugs out there, and I myself am not feeling perfectly normal either. It’s mortifying.
At this point the denouement can only be penetration, over there on the far side of the stone parapet, where there’s a grassy patch that seems to have been made for such exertions. The elusive three–three is drawing near. The horny Apollo has seen it now, the grassy little terrace over the lake, and his probabilistic savvy has already weighed the pros and cons. He’s calculated the Euclidean distance from the two nearest toad-grabbers and concluded that the sound waves will sink below the threshold of audibility before reaching them. He’s checked that the condom in the back pocket of his jeans for every contingency is still there. I’m watching, enchanted, about to witness one of those scenes essential to every NC-17 movie.
Instead, without any preamble, she turns on her miner’s lamp and, taking plumpish stilt-walker’s long strides, heads down the hill to where the wee zoologist is standing. Young Apollo is gobsmacked (and truth be told, I didn’t expect this either). He was primed to enjoy the plunge, or at least the solipsistic treat of a blow job, (what a term). Now he’s worried that this nutcase is off to snitch on him to his girlfriend. He fluffs his dreamy aerodynamic forelock and watches as she becomes a band of light bobbing in the dark. Had he moved too fast? Had he done something wrong? His rock-hard erection is now just a memory.
And so, without being too obvious about it, he begins to move toward them, keeping his ears cocked. His stomach is aching and he badly needs to take a dump.[17] The geneticist isn’t ratting on him, though, just standing by the tiny zoologist picking up toads and putting them down on the valley side of the road with motherly delicacy, giving each one a gentle pat with the backs of her fingers. Her voice is softer and more cheerful, she looks happy there above the lake, its leaden depths streaked white by the moon. He breathes a sigh of relief and glancing at his phone thinks what luck (luck, such a detestable concept!) because everything seems to be under control. At that very instant he steps on a toad that’s been flattened on the asphalt and slips. As he falls, he hits his elbow violently—I mean very, very violently—and we hear a sound like the neat snapping of a branch.
THE REPOSE OF THE GALAXIES
This business, so tedious from every point of view, is extremely concerning, to employ a lame expression from the small sample I have at my disposal. I’m thinking about it—the italics are unavoidable—much too much. That’s why I decided on a change of scene today. I decided to wander where my divine feet (atomic reactors?) take me, enjoying the clean air (let’s call it that) of intergalactic space, listening from afar to the eternal whirring of elliptical, spiral, and even globular galaxies, the last being the most crowded, that is the most metropolitan. Humans have a somewhat nineteenth-century notion of the cosmos, they imagine a post-Romantic soundscape, with screaming violins and Wagnerian bellowing; in fact the music of the spheres is more like repeated limpid tinkling interrupted by sharp rustling and the odd explosion, as well as sudden and slightly irritable metallic lacerations.
The few heavenly bodies visible from that modest globelet called Earth are all very well—Sun, Moon—and they’ve inspired some earnest, dulcet tunes. Fact is, though, you can see interesting stuff just by looking through a keyhole. People make do with what they have. However, there’s nothing remotely like the heartrending immensity of the universe, gleaming with iridescent lights and palpitating cascades of stars. Not to mention that it’s utterly uncontaminated; God willing no intruder’s ever going to set foot in it, apart from a few ramshackle earthly space probes with meager range capabilities.
Without meaning to—you may think that’s irony, but it’s not—I found myself next to two galaxies, one large, one small, that were approaching each other. The deformed shape of the little one, slight but perceptible even to a non-divine eye, like a woman’s belly in the fourth or fifth month of pregnancy, made it evident there was an attraction between the two. Later, they would draw closer together and the short, plump galaxy would be sucked in by the large, long one, giving up some of its mass or even being obliterated altogether—always an unsettling event. Now this is instructive to watch, I said to myself, these are cosmic events worth following. Faced with the—I want to say choreography—of the universe, I was recovering the serenity that permeates my heart, call it a heart. No superfluous sentiments, no cloying romanticism, no pointless description needed: what was before me was monumental in its austere abstraction. I have all the time in the world, I can stay here right to the end, I thought, positioning myself to obtain the optimal viewing angle and trying to get comfortable, as they say. The way you stretch out your legs to watch one of those long, long art films in which very little happens, indeed nothing at all happens, but which (wo)men of good taste find stylistically perfect.
If anything cheers me up and makes me feel especially divine, it’s the interactions between galaxies. It’s the elegance of their trajectories, the gorgeous dance numbers executed in perfect detail, their infinite slowness, the sensation of heartbreaking melancholy, but also peace, almost mirth, a tragic mirth that emanates from them, whatever it is, I forget all the rest and feel joyous. Of course, a god is always joyous—what god’s a malcontent, a whiner?—but in this case I’m feeling slightly more joyous, because when by definition one is perfect, differences are measured in microscopic gradations.
To tell the truth, though, there was also a sour aftertaste in my mouth that wasn’t entirely pleasant (for the purposes of metaphor, let us posit I have a mouth, taste buds). And it was only getting worse. Watching the two galaxies converge, I couldn’t help thinking that the beanpole geneticist, too, was heading for a crash, with a body far denser than her own and equipped with much greater gravitational pull. It was a question of mere days and not millions of years, but the highly predictable outcome, as has happened hundreds of billions of times in the cosmos, was that Casanova would either appropriate some of her matter and continue merrily on his way, or he would mercilessly swallow her whole, celebrating with a loud belch.
The very thought astonished me, for never before had the meeting of two galaxies seemed to me a symbol of anything, and it completely spoiled the show. I left the two lovely ladies to their destiny, and headed home. By that I mean the place where I tend to stay, not so much a place as a nexus of the mind, the spirit. What made me move my butt, to use a slovenly expression, was the thought that if I stayed there watching to the bitter end, there wouldn’t be a trace of the beanpole left. In a few million years, not even a tooth out of the poor thing’s mouth would remain. I’d find ranks of crocodiles and other hideous beasties typical of warmer climes, jaws unsheathed. Maybe even iguanas. Thousands of iguanas roaming the industrial plain once inhabited by bipeds, now a swamp, the bipeds extinct. Iguanas with absolutely no sense of humor, iguanas that bite.[18]
17
If there’s something that bothers me about men, I mean males, it’s their cowardice. They brag and boast, they convince others and themselves they’re brave as lions, they go out and blow their entire wages in one night, they show off, pontificate. And then at the first obstacle they revert to being an infant in a diaper: they whine, moan about their fate, beg for some compassionate wing to hide under. From the Get-Go they’ve all been that way, the only difference is that in the Upper Paleolithic there were no cell phones and social networks to multiply their foolishness.
18
It’s pointless to discuss crocodiles, they bite and have always bitten. I made them that way, and I take full responsibility. If I’d done it any other way, we’d have a madly overcrowded animal shelter instead of a food chain, and all of nature would be in chaos. The only proper choice was to have the larger animals eat the small. I couldn’t afford to get sentimental about it.