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288 pages, Paperback
First published September 27, 2022
When a lab monkey doesn’t have a mother, a cigarette-smoking man in a white coat and horn-rimmed glasses will give the monkey a rolled-up pair of socks and the socks become their mother. Or, more accurately, the monkey needs a mother so badly that it can project enough mother things onto the socks that they do the trick. Become a Motherthing. The socks become a Motherthing, scribbles the cigarette-smoking lab coat man, who tastes his pen and continues writing: They can hug it and stroke it and put their cheek against it and it calms them down, really calms them down. The way a mother would. A real remarkable effect. The baby monkey’s heart rate decreases, blood pressure lowers, all the magic medicine a mother is.
“Bottomless brown eyes,” I repeat, wincing as I open my can, a mysterious habit with an origin I’ve buried for good reason I’m sure.
“They were strange. Almost frothing.”
I sip my soda, slurp the rim. “Brown hot tubs.”
He frowns. “You’re thinking about diarrhea.”
“Well, obviously, Ralph. You’re thinking about diarrhea too.”
“Only because I know that you are.”
“Perfect body temperature, thick enough to hold you. Might actually be better than water.”
He admits with a shrug that it would be nice to sag nearly suspended, perfectly warm, in a pool of slack shit. “It would have to be ethically sourced, of course.”
• A small man who seems to wear his flesh, hoisting and adjusting it like a child in his father’s suit jacket, is standing behind a chest-height desk. He comes around and greets us. “You must be the Lambs.” He extends his hand, shaking it free of its flesh-sleeve, connecting first with Ralph, then with me. The top of his head barely comes to my chin, but he’s practiced a way to make it seem like he’s not looking up at you. “How are you both?”
• Ralph is doing that weird smile again, like the back of his skull is pulled off and Laura is manipulating his folds with her hands.
• I look at her face. How her skin pools on the bed so her head seems like a melted candle, lips parted, mouth empty, small hard skull a hidden treasure buried in wax.
Boys are boys and they do what they want. Women want things too sometimes, but mostly they’re just warm sensory boards for men to tweak and rub and learn about themselves and the world through.
I see it now, the contours of a plan, a perfect food or, rather, a meal perfectly executed, which will revive that long-buried instinct in Ralph, to be alive, despite the shock of it. To stay alive, despite the pain of it. A food, a flavor, offered once by his Motherthing to make suddenly being alive all right. I can revive that instinct. I can replicate that flavor.
I just have to grab a few things first.