A Love Story
Joel Lamore
It began with a death. The world died. Jerry
blinked, and in the brief darkness of that blink, the world ceased to
exist. When he opened his eyes, there was nothing. Nothing except
Elena. Jerry was much given to exaggerations of this kind. But it was
in solipsistic annihilations of this sort which Jerry found his
greatest satisfactions. Standing there among the X-rays of Elena's
skull, he searched for the foundations of her beauty. He imagined
himself lost in the caverns and archways of her skull as he studied
one X-ray after another. Then he would compare a certain X-ray that
sparked in him an indefinable sorrow, which he equated with beauty,
to a feature of Elena's actual face as she lay on the surgical table.
Jerry searched for an epiphany of form in which he might finally
lodge his obsession and so rest from its exertions. Other methods of
exploration had long since failed.
For Elena, the experience differed in several
ways. First, a crystal goblet remained suspended before her, slightly
tilted, poised as if it waited for her to drink. This goblet existed
only in her mind, the result of an anomaly in the visual cortex of
her brain caused by the mixture of drugs used to secure her
anesthesia. Second, Elena felt only a kind of nausea in her blood as
the anesthetic slowly waned. This interfered with her otherwise
natural empathy for the predicament of the goblet, but heightened her
fascination. A distinct humming could also be heard, but she could
not decide if it originated from the inside or outside of her head.
Finally, Elena suffered from a curious type of amnesia in which only
memories of unpleasant occurrences were absent. This amnesia,
further, extended into the present so that no memories of current
unpleasant happenings could be formed.
Jerry traced the veins and arteries of his body
with a scalpel. He scraped the blade lightly along the skin, leaving
a red line, and at times drew blood. This was yet another example of
his melancholic romanticism. The occasional blood and sting only
strengthened his mood. It also provided the vertiginous illusion of
some kind of progress in his investigation. The circulatory system
provided a schematic of his emotions, he concluded, and attended even
closer to his work, noting connections and relationships that might
yield up important revelations. He was down to tracing, with the aid
of a magnifying mirror, the capillaries in his left eye when the
situation took an unexpected turn. Elena began to speak. Jerry
listened, leaning closer to hear, but he could not understand what
Elena was saying. Her speech did not sound foreign, yet no word
seemed familiar to him.
On Elena's part, the effort toward speech and
communication was genuine but complicated by her peculiar form of
amnesia. Since no word did not for her contain some unpleasant
association, her only recourse was to speak those words she had never
before heard. However, Jerry was not the object of her speech.
Rather, she spoke to the crystal goblet in search of some words to
coax it to tilt toward her lips. It remained motionless.
Perhaps Elena's imploring tone led Jerry to
believe that she spoke to him, though his natural predisposition
probably would have lead him to make such an inference in any case.
Certainly the words, or sounds, seemed pleasant even though they were
ultimately enigmatic to him. Jerry spent several minutes listening to
the syncopated rhythms of her words. His own mind began to work to
imagine meanings for the words: extravagant fantasies of promises,
endearments, and whole narratives. But as he listened, the words
began to change. He had already noted that there seemed to be no
repetition in her speech, which he realized made deciphering
impossible. But as the speech progressed, the words got harsher,
utilizing wild, improbable sounds in their construction.
Again, Elena labored with genuine intentions, but
her amnesia made it impossible for her to reuse a word once it had
been spoken. The situation had some elements of unpleasantness,
despite, or perhaps because of, the after effects of the anesthetic.
And thus each word as it emerged was polluted with some shade of this
unpleasantness, this discomfort. Immediately each word vanished from
her memory and possibility. Thus it became necessary to use odd
sounds, phonemes from other languages and, in the last stages of her
effort, nearly inhuman sounds. Finally, after one last effort at
producing her last and most chilling of words, there was nothing left
to do but fall silent again.
Jerry's romantic proclivities read hostility into
those final words, and he became disconsolate when Elena ended her
speech with a kind of contorted scream. The silence that followed
weighed heavy on him so that he wept bitterly at his failings. A
brief moment interposed in this desolation in which his soul soared
in an ecstatic episode of euphoric melancholy. He seemed nearly to
grasp the obscure happiness at the burning core of beauty he had
sought for what seemed lifetimes. Such intense emotion could not be
sustained, and he soon lapsed back into bitter weeping. After a time,
an insensate calm possessed him, and he began once more to trace the
intricacies of his circulatory system, but with more violence than
his previous explorations. Before long, he succeeded in opening a
vertical gash in one of his carotid arteries. He died a moment later.
Elena felt the spray of Jerry's blood over her and
concluded that her beloved crystal goblet had somehow tilted forward
as she had wished and spilled its longed for contents. Though her
vision indicated the goblet had not moved, as indeed such a situation
was impossible, she nevertheless believed the goblet was responsible
for the warm rain that refreshed her. Elena experienced a moment of
complete happiness. This proved to be her one and only memory, and
apart from it, nothing at all had ever happened.
Fiction Archives
Stephanie Waxman: Frank’s Boy Nelson James Dunford:Teams of Many Men Joseph Guderian:The Other’s Shoe J. Merrolla:What the Dope Was Zdravka Evtimova:The Sick Horse Joel Lamore: A Love Story