“Oh, I wish I could stay with you,” she said, tightening her arms around him. “Why does it always have to be this way?”
And he said, “There, there, my dear,” resorting to the same helpless phrase every father in the world used to console his daughter after she scraped her leg or crushed her fingers in a door, because why did it have to be this way?
He began to stroke her hair. That was all it took. Experience had taught him that the longer he held her, the harder she would cry, and so he drew himself slowly away and finished changing out of his uniform. He sipped at the glass of wine she had left on the table and then went to the mirror to comb his hair. There were three gray strands above the temple. He plucked them out and examined them in the light. It was obvious to the Keptin that he had turned a corner in the past year. His eyes were dimmer than they used to be, his waist thicker, and just a few days ago he had discovered a small rough mark the size and color of a brown cherry on the underside of his arm. He had jettisoned his youth so suddenly. He had learned to love too late. Why couldn't humans be like his science officer, he wondered, with a life span of centuries? Raïssa sat at the foot of the bed sniffing back a few last tears. She seemed so young, and yet soon her own eyes would grow tired, her skin would lose its luster, and there would be no going back for either one of them. If only they could have known each other as children, he thought, when a different sort of life might have been possible—or if only he could leave his commission, and she could leave her husbands, and they could make a different sort of life together now. But he knew that there would be no other life for the two of them. They had not been young together, and they would not be old together, either.
Yet still he went to the bed and kissed her and said, “Are you feeling better now? Don't worry. We'll think of something.”
“What, though? What?” she asked.
He did not have an answer, would never have an answer, and she looked at him and gripped his hand and gave a brokenhearted sigh. In the silence that filled the room, they could hear a purring sound, the same quietly rolling buzz the Keptin had been listening to as he fell asleep for weeks. After a while, Raïssa said, “Well, at least you have your tribbles to keep you company while I'm away.”
“Tribble,” he said. “You gave me only the one. And I've barely touched it.”
A straight line creased her brow. “Tribbles are born pregnant, and they reproduce exponentially. I thought you knew that.”
“I didn't.”
The Keptin got up and opened the door to his spare room. Inside there were thousands of tribbles, maybe tens of thousands, heaped together in a single great pile that held the high, flat shape of the door for a second before spilling over onto his legs. There were so many tribbles that the air seemed to vibrate with their purring. He was astonished that they had been able to accumulate in such numbers without his awareness. He could not imagine how he would ever get rid of them all. And as Raïssa came up behind him and said his name, locking her arms around his waist, he understood that a long time of difficulty lay before them and their troubles were only just beginning.
—Pavel Chekov
Stardate 6823.6
A FABLE CONTAINING A REFLECTION THE SIZE OF A MATCH HEAD IN ITS PUPIL
Once there was a city where people did not look one another in the eye. It had been that way for as long as anyone could remember. Old married couples lowered their heads like swans as they sat on park benches together. Young mothers stared sweetly at the folds of their babies' necks. Whenever two people met in conversation, each would rest his gaze on the blank surface of the other's shirt, and though occasionally, in a fit of daring, the most intimate of lovers might go so far as to watch each other's lips move, to venture any higher was considered the gravest of social transgressions.
The people who lived in the city were no less curious about one another than you and I. They had the same longings, the same anxieties, the same slowly building affections that seemed to take their hearts over little by little like waves spilling across a beach, but at some point in the distant past the belief had grown among them that eye contact was dangerous. Every child was taught that the eye was where the spark of life was located. That spark was always hungry, they learned, and it fed on the things it saw. It stood to reason, then, that to look into someone else's eye was to risk having your spark consumed, if not devoured in a single swallow, then eaten away a piece at a time. The common understanding among the inhabitants of the city was that people were born with only a small amount of life in their eyes and that when it emptied out, it could not be replenished. This one thing they were certain of above all others: just as staring into the sun would eventually steal their sight from them, so, too, staring into another pair of eyes would eventually steal their souls.
Because the people of the city lived in fear that they would unintentionally meet someone's gaze, they developed the habit of shutting their eyes whenever anything took them by surprise; they might be walking down the sidewalk in all innocence when a car engine would backfire or a metal door would slam. The noise would startle them, and instinctively they would twist around, and then—and then it would happen. So they closed their eyes and they waited for the shock to pass. The children of the city received this lesson early. Before half a dozen years had gone by, they knew without thinking to screw their eyes tight during any moment of tension or uncertainty. The custom followed them into their adulthood, so that every time a hospital phoned with a diagnosis, every time a lecturer stepped up to a microphone, every time one person said “I love you” or “I want you to love me” to another, they would fasten their eyelids shut like penitents kneeling at an altar. The risk was just too great.
Occasionally, of course, in spite of all their precautions, someone would accidentally have his gaze arrested by someone else. It was inevitable. Whenever it happened, the two people involved would feel a hard current of energy passing between them, flowing as smooth and fast as a river. They knew that if it was not the life draining out of their eyes, it was something no less powerful or disturbing, and they turned away with a shiver of nameless emotion.
You might imagine that in a city such as this even the closest of friends would often walk past each other without recognition, but somehow everyone made do, finding ways to distinguish the people they knew by their voices or the sound of their laughs, their gait or the cut of their clothing. They met in restaurants where all the diners kept their eyes fixed on their plates. They went to clothing stores where all the mirrors faced empty corners. They drove to work and fell in love, grew ill and slept in on Saturdays, filling their lives in all the ways that people everywhere do, and yet their reluctance to look one another in the eye could not fail to affect them. Sometimes a painful shyness would overtake them, sometimes a free-floating nostalgia. They made sure never to look directly into the camera when they were having their pictures taken, and on their desks and in their wallets you would see photo after photo of people staring thoughtfully off to the side, tilting their heads as if they were trying to remember the formula for converting grams to ounces.
Doubtless it was because they could not meet face-to-face that they remained such riddles to one another. Every mother was a mystery to her child, every husband a mystery to his wife. Even the simplest of souls was like a brightly painted house that on the inside was full of shadowy spaces and hidden rooms. From the minute they were born until the minute they died, the people of the city took great care to avoid staring too closely at those they loved, and as a result, at wakes and at funerals, it was not at all uncommon to see bereaved men and women clutching at the face being laid to rest, prying its eyes open now that they could finally look into them without fear of what they would find there.
It was true that, at one time or another, everyone was tempted to examine the features of someone who had fallen asleep—nurses tending their patients, children playing truth or dare at slumber parties, parents whose babies had suddenly gone quiet in their cribs—but t
here was always the danger that the sleeping person would wake, so no one gave in to the temptation very often.
In the city where people did not look one another in the eye, signs and paintings that might ordinarily have been fixed some five feet above the floor were instead placed at knee level. The trellises in public gardens rose no higher than bicycle racks. The peepholes on front doors were drilled at a slight downward angle, revealing the clasped hands or belt buckle of whoever stood in front of them. As a result of these and other such measures, the men and women who lived in the city had long since taken up the habit of dipping their heads whenever they stepped out in public. They did so in sunlight and in darkness, and regardless of the danger of meeting someone else's eye, a custom that lent them the humble if not pious bearing of virgins in medieval portraits.
It is one of the curiosities of life that putting on a smile can make you happy, just as putting on a scowl can make you angry and putting on tears can make you sad, and in much the same way, adopting the postures of modesty had made the people who would not look one another in the eye uncommonly reserved and timid. They found it difficult to begin romances and just as difficult to end them. Words such as love and need and miss came slowly to their lips, however quickly they came to their hearts. Long after their youthful friendships had hardened and died, they would continue carrying them across their shoulders like laborers hauling sacks of gravel. They cringed at the thought of bringing hurt to one another, no matter how unwittingly, and often they would lie awake at night silently chastising themselves for some tiny slip of manners they feared might have wounded someone.
And so it went on, with the years laying their winters down flat upon their summers, and everyone passing within inches of one another, and everyone looking away. Bartenders kept their heads bowed to their beer taps. Teachers addressed their lessons to the back corners of their classrooms. Occasionally, in the fever of adolescence, boys and girls of a certain character would meet in the alleys behind convenience stores to get drunk and participate in staring contests. Just a few seconds of direct scrutiny was enough to make their knees go weak and a cocaine-fizz of light suffuse their heads. There was so much life in their eyes, they hardly knew what to do with it all. Why not throw a little bit away? Though most of them were able to kick the habit as they grew older, the ones who couldn't spent the rest of their days in confusion and misery, coming together for quick liaisons in forgotten stretches of city parks or attending slash films in dank theaters where the actors stared directly out of the screen. They usually died young, such people, and there were never very many of them, but more than a few of the city's residents enjoyed stepping as close to the margins of the taboo as they could without actually violating it. Fashion models would almost but not quite lift their eyes from out of the pages of lingerie ads. Motivational speakers would initiate trust exercises coaxing whole sales teams into holding still while one of their coworkers wove his line of vision between their heads. Young lovers overcome by curiosity about each other would play the old erotic game of closing their eyes so they could take turns running their gaze over each other's faces, poring over their lips, cheeks, and temples in all their harmlessness and tranquillity. Afterward, they would feel as if they had woken from a strange and wonderful dream. They might be sitting on a couch together, or lying front to back in the center of a king-size bed, but in their minds they were still tracing the soft blue curvature of each other's eyelids, gasping audibly with every flicker of their lashes.
The city where no one looked anyone else in the eye produced its fair share of human happiness, but it was a cautious sort of happiness, never spilling too far past its own boundaries. If you had stopped people on the street to ask them whether they were happy, they would have had to search their feelings carefully for an answer, and as often as not they would not have found one waiting for them. So, too, if you had asked them whether they were desperate or fearful, hopeful or contented. They kept their passions hidden, even from themselves, for they had grown accustomed to their lives and did not wish to see them overturned.
And yet, though most of them were at peace with the custom of turning their gazes away from one another, every so often someone would realize that he had become tired of treasuring up the sparks in his eyes and fall silent for a day or two. It happened not only to teenagers groping toward their futures, but to grown men and women who had already come into the fullness of life, and occasionally even to those nearing the end. They had never stood on a stage under the surveillance of a crowd. They should not have known what it felt like to spend long minutes staring longingly into someone's eyes. Yet something inside them missed those things terribly.
When it got to be too much for them, they would lift their heads—uncertainly at first, and then with a poise that surprised them—and begin looking for a pair of eyes that was willing to meet their own, no matter the consequence, for however long it took until they expended the last of their souls.
As for the rest of the city's residents, they went on with their days exactly as they always had. They worked and they slept. They wrote letters and they talked over dinner. Sometimes they married. They never knew if they could have been more to each other than what they were, but on the other hand they were already so much—too much to fathom or bear sometimes. Every one of them was like a sealed box with an impenetrable mystery at its center.
As are you, and as am I.
And I do love you, you know.
HOME VIDEOS
People aren't funny. I work for one of America's longest-running family television series, a show you would certainly recognize if I told you the name. Each week we broadcast a full hour of home video footage featuring the blunders and foul-ups of our ordinary (oh, how ordinary) viewers, awarding a cash prize to the contestant who provides the funniest clip of the evening. My job is to screen the four or five hundred videos that arrive at our office every week and, along with the other associate producers, separate out the ones that are most likely to get a laugh. So I know whereof I speak.
The following is a short list of subjects that people seem to find funny: athletes failing to make a catch, babies with sloppy eating habits, good weather turning bad, actors flubbing their lines, children sitting on the toilet, pets sitting on the toilet (the kids in the toilet videos we receive are almost always reading or singing or engaging in some other commonplace activity—singing is the most popular—but the animals just sit there with these imperturbable looks on their faces, like figures on a totem pole), pets falling off pieces of furniture, children falling off pieces of furniture, and people—usually old people or fat people—snoring.
Also small objects being crushed by bigger objects.
Also grown men being jabbed, smacked, or buffeted in the genitals.
It's not often that we receive something truly extraordinary, something we've never seen before, much less anything that can chip out an honest laugh, so when Pram called the rest of us over to his monitor one afternoon with “I've got a live one here, you guys,” I think it's fair to say we were all pretty skeptical.
Pramoedya—Pram—came on staff about a year ago. The other associate producers are Karen, Leo, and myself. I've been with the show from the days when it was just a one-hour special airing opposite Sister Kate and My Two Dads. My name is fifth from the top now when the closing credits roll. I can still remember when it made the climb from thirtieth to twenty-seventh. I may have wasted my life.
The video Pram was screening knocked me sideways. A man was posing nude on a stool in front of what looked like a college-level drawing class. A full-colored erection was bobbing up from his crotch. His eyes were twisted shut in the earnest, jittery way of a little kid counting off numbers in a game of hide-and-seek, and I could tell that he was trying, really trying, to quell the erection, but without much success.
Now, we receive what we call “do-it-yourself pornography” at the show all the time, sometimes from exhibitionists, sometimes from people who just forget t
hey've taped the honeymoon along with the wedding. But what made this video so unique—and, yes, funny—was how accidental the whole thing seemed. The instructor was talking to the class from off camera, saying something about how she wanted them to concentrate their attention on the ten major muscle groups. Then she must have noticed the model's condition, because suddenly she stopped and puffed out the words, “Oh my. That's no good.” I should say here that the model was not an attractive man. He was all folds and rotundities where no folds and rotundities should be. In the foreground of the shot—and this was best of all—a student's hand was working to add a very adroit rendition of the model's penis to a very clumsy rendition of the rest of the model, as though some Rembrandt had suddenly risen up inside her.
By the time the screen went blank, we were laughing as loudly as our idiot viewers. Pram rewound the tape and we watched the model's erection wither away like a flower closing up on itself in one of those time-lapse nature documentaries, which made us laugh even harder.
Pram did a little flourish with his hand, taking credit for the discovery. “Thank you. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. A shame we can't broadcast this.”
He was right, of course. The network would never allow it, even if we eclipsed the offending parts behind a solid black bar. One of the unspoken rules of prime-time television: you can show the sexual organs experiencing pain, but you cannot show the sexual organs experiencing pleasure.
“Still,” said Leo. “Can you imagine the reaction we would get?”
Now, you would think a guy named Leo would have a rumble to his voice, like cement revolving inside a metal drum, but our Leo sounded like a twelve-year-old boy who wouldn't hit puberty for another three years, the perfect voice for the impersonation he did. “ ‘And how many times have you good people been out tending your gardens when this happened to you? Hold on to your watering cans, folks.’ ”