I

t begins with me pulling away all the furniture Father shoved against the door the preceding night. He does it every night so he won’t be able to get out and spill important secrets after he has had too much to drink.

Father is a boozehound. And a genius. And a tortured soul. That description would serve for just about any of the nuts who have ever given something to the world and have received stones in return. The world is good at shortchanging. It’s ungrateful. Or maybe it’s simply confused, like Father.

We live in a tower. It isn’t ivory and it has no ivy growing on it. It’s made of rough concrete blocks, is a hundred feet high and about seventy feet wide. Home.

Father hates the world.

Or himself. He loves me.

After putting the furniture back in place, I opened the door and looked out. What was to see? Nothing. A hallway and the elevator Father used once in a blue moon, when he took the jeep and went over the hills into town to stock up on food or to replenish his booze supply. It was a hick town. I suppose father and I were hicks.

The morning of my typical day didn’t last long. I dusted the living room. I ate corn flakes. I turned the gas on under the lab beakers— same thing every time I got up. A humdrum existence, Father said. Maybe so. It was all right with me.

Lunch? I thought about it, looked at the clock. No, it wasn’t time for lunch, which meant there was something I had forgotten to do. Schedules, schedules, what the hell did 1 leave out?

Oh, yeah, 1 forgot to watch the races. Checked the clock. Wrong. It wasn’t time for the races. Hmmm. Oh, sure, I didn’t wash my face and brush my teeth.

Did that. All finished. The phone rang.

“Hello.”

“Hello. Hello?”

“Hello.”

“Is that you. Doctor Dakis?” “No, it ain’t.”

“Doctor? This is the University calling. Will you speak louder, please? I can’t—”

“Every damned day of the week, you call. Same time, same place. Every damned day we go through the same spiel. I’m here, you’re there, but there’s simply no communicating between us. I know you. Miss Fat Rearend. Father told me your name. Miss Fat Rearend, will you please kiss my—”

“Hello. Doctor Dakis?”

She finally gave up and hung up. “Get the hell off the phone!” Father roared from his bedroom. “I’m off.”

He didn’t come out, turned over so hard the bed whacked the floor. In another minute I heard him snoring.

It started raining. I hung out the window in the north side of the tower and watched the silver needles fall from the sky. God, I loved rain. I spat down the tower, watched it mingle with the clean washing from heaven, saw it disappear, wished the world would renew its acquaintance with Father so his misery would go away like my spit. I’m eight years old.

The phone rang.

“Hello.”

“Doctor Dakis?”

“Hi, Miss Fat Rearend. No, we ain’t got no eggs for you today. And we ain’t got no sperm, neither.” “Doctor Dakis?”

I screamed in her ear and she hung up.

“Get the hell off the phone!” Father roared from his bedroom. He turned over and went back to sleep.

H

E GOT up at noon and we had lunch together.

“Make me eat it,” he said to me. His head dangled over his plate as if it had a broken connection.

I spooned some egg into his mouth. He grabbed his cup of coffee and gulped. I stuffed toast through his teeth. Again he gulped coffee. I held a strip of bacon and he nibbled that.

I made him eat two eggs, three strips of bacon and two slices of toast. After he finished he wiped his mouth, belched, looked sick, got up and stumbled into the bathroom.

“Get the hell out,” he growled— slammed the door in my face A bell rang somewhere. I ran to the open window, looked down. A blue truck was parked in the front

yard and the driver was pounding on the door.

“What you want?” I said.

He backed away from the door, looked up, saw me and waved an envelope.

“Can’t you rfead?” 1 said. “Put it in the basket and I’ll pull it up.” He kept waving the envelope. I hung on the windowsill and watched him grow agitated. Finally he saw the basket, threw the envelope into it, gave me a severe glare and took his truck away.

The cable was from Germany. This time the zoo offered fifty thousand for the aphrodisiac.

“Who have you been talking to?” I said to Father as he came out of the bathroom. “I thought you didn’t want anybody to know about the aphrodisiac.”

He kicked a clothes hamper out of his way and hunted on a bureau top for a comb. He combed his hair, his most beautiful feature. It was long and white and wavy. His skin was almost as white as his hair, which was why he made me coax him to eat. His health was poor. I think if it wasn’t for me he would have been dead long ago.

He combed his hair and smacked his lips, rubbed them with a trembly hand, looked at me with big sorrowful eyes. What he wanted was a stiff belt. What he expected me to bring him was a beer. What I got for him, out of the bureau, was a box of chocolate-covered cherries. With a shrug he took two and ate them, took two more and shoved them in his shirt pocket. He ate them before he got out the door. I had the box ready when he turned back. He had half a dozen.

Fine. When he ate candy he didn’t have beer and when he had no beer he didn’t follow it up with whisky. Today he would do some work. Marvelous, that candy. Me, too.

In the beginning, Father had no money and figured he would end on a farm, but he was too bright and went to school nights and eventually he got hooked on genetics. Or he hooked it. Everything he did was right. He took his Ph.D. and taught at the University. After a while he stopped teaching and did only research.

Sex wasn’t something people did, according to Father. Sex was a phenomenon, like life. Gender wasn’t sex. Sex was mating but not the mating of male and female people. It was the mating of living organisms inside people. Father didn’t have a better word for the two things that joined to make a baby. Or he didn’t want to go to the bother of explaining it to me in technical terms. “Bugs” was good enough. A girl bug and a boy bug mated and the whys and wherefores were mysteries to nearly everybody except my dad. A girl bug was an ovum, or an egg, while a boy bug was a sperm, or a beak. Beaks pierced eggs and the rest was downhill coasting.

Bugs were too selective to suit most geneticists. Why did they seem to want to mate only with their own species? Anyhow, once a beak pierced an egg, the egg either died or accommodated the invader. This was hazardous joining on the microscopic level. Father never seemed to rise beyond this level as far as his personal life was concerned. At least, I didn’t think he was mating with anyone … How did I get on this subject?

Father became famous when he invented the racecourse. We had one in the den, Plenty of people had them now.

I

t was a daily chore of mine to clean the racecourse after lunch. I dismantled it, ran a clean wire through it and put it back together again. It was a transparent tube with an incubator in its center and two little bubbles on the ends. The whole thing was about twenty-four inches long.

As he watched me, Father said, “You take an egg—you think she has no personality? That little girl is complete within herself, eats, eliminates, breathes, moves—and damned if she doesn’t have a purpose. That’s to mate—butter and bread to her. She loves it. Another thing, she kills her lover when she’s done with him.”

I knew all that. He had told me many times. I knew the sperm, or beak, was suicidal and basically a rapist. He was sex-happy, had nothing else on his mind. He would mate or die—in fact, he would kill himself in the attempt rather than leave off. Father said the beak screamed just before he died. Father was working on a miniature amplifier to pick up their sounds. Anyhow, the beak was stupid, or else he didn’t expect to get eaten, just wanted what he wanted and to hell with the consequences.

As for the egg, she had poor sensory equipment and recognized only sperm from her own species. Father wanted to study this phenomenon and find out why she would have nothing to do with certain sperm. He thought maybe it was their smell, or something simple like that. Often she turned down one of her own kind and took a total stranger—of course. Father had given the stranger a squirt of his invention so she would notice him. Or smell him. Or whatever it was eggs did. It was best to talk about them as if they were men and women, because, actually, the bugs were the only true sexes in the world. They were male or female and no maybes about it.

People were dumb. They thought they could jump in bed and that was all there was to it, but the bugs in their bodies were out to get together and nothing short of disaster or bad breath or body odor or whatever could stop them. The bugs didn’t care about population control—there was plenty of clean space in their worlds. People didn’t realize there were life forms in their bodies that could destroy the planet.

“I’m a male chauvinist pig,” said Father. “I admit it. That’s what half the peojple in this world call me. What it means is that I’m like the bugs inside me. I want what I want when I want it. I have no consideration. It’s the same with women. They’re female chauvinist pigs. If they can’t get what they want they have a fit. They’re larger extensions of the bugs inside them. If we all came up from the slime, we couldn’t have been very big in those wet days. Still, who won the climb up the evolutionary ladder? Whose environment is polluted, who’s killing each other off, who hates each other?” Father tapped his fingers on the table top. “I keep asking myself the same damned question—which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

He stopped talking. He stared up at the ceiling perplexed, bruised of soul.

I went on cleaning the racecourse. It was shaped like a female reproductive system. A sperm was ejected from a depository into one of the bubbles at the ends of the tube and an egg was ejected into the other bubble. Fluid carried them to the incubator where they were supposed to join. Sometimes they didn’t. It depended upon how my dad was feeling. If he felt crabby or pensive, the sperm got a squirt of dad’s invention—the aphrodisiac—and the joining was frenzied. If he felt sad or apprehensive the sperm got no treatment and the egg remained aloof and impenetrable.

Squirting an egg produced no reaction.

Father said the squirting muffled the sperm’s undesirable qualities. What they were, he didn’t know. He suspected the egg exuded a killer fluid that destroyed stranger sperm. He had better look, smell, taste or sound right or she would murder him before he did his duty.

The rendezvous in the incubator in Father’s lab always involved an egg and a sperm from different species. Once, long before, I asked him why and he said, “Who wants to mate a duo of human bugs? I know fellows who do that all the time. Nate Farrell likes it. He’s at the University. Teaches a couple of classes and spends his spare time complaining about the liberalized abortion laws. He claims the fetus is alive at conception. In the basement of his house he whiles away the time by creating human fetuses in a racecourse. He dumps them in the toilet when he’s done.”

I watched a tiger and a lion run the race to the incubator. Of course they were really only bugs, but I knew where they had originated. Father could work wonders with dyes and gels. A little dab of colored gel on a sperm made him look pretty big, especially since the walls of the tube were made of magnifying glass. A yellow dot was a tiger sperm, a pink ball was a lion egg, et cetera. I had memorized them all.

The mating of tiger and lion bugs wasn’t at all difficult, so I knew Father was feeling sad that day. Such a mating could have taken place in a zoo between two real animals. Racecourse mating between tiger and lion bugs occurred ninety nine times out of a hundred. In a zoo, these animals rarely mated and getting a baby from them was more rare.

1 stood beside the table and watched the race. The course sat on a white table and was about at my eye level. The little yellow dot and the larger pink ball fell into the incubator, spied one another, had a tussle. The yellow dot stabbed hard, the pink ball squeezed him and gave him a thrill and then she opened and he fell in with a scream, after which she ate him. And I could have sworn I heard the scream.

The phone rang a moment later and Father stomped out of the lab. He never answered the phone, but he wouldn’t get rid of it and I knew why. When it rang the outside world spoke—and Father needed to hear that sound.

I answered it. “Hello.”

It was the same old thing. They couldn’t hear me because of my speech impediment and all they wanted was to fleece my dad out of his formula. The University wanted him to come back to his professorship. Sometimes they offered him money for the formula, but not often, because they knew of the exorbitant offers he had received from abroad.

I thought he couldn’t keep a secret, believed he had blabbed to someone in town during one of his drunken excursions. His explanation was that they had figured it out for themselves.

“They’re idiots but they aren’t morons,” he said. “How can I send them a living dog-cat fetus in a box unless I know how to make the sperm bug acceptable? I tell them it was an accident. Sure. Then they beg me for more and I send them a sparrow-hamster fetus. It never ends. They bitch because the hybrids can’t reproduce. Finally they conclude I’m doing something they can’t do. Hell, I’ve always done that.”

Either he wasn’t telling me all of the truth or he had simply forgotten. The moochers might have guessed he knew how to make stranger-sperm acceptable, but it wasn’t coincidence when they called the formula an aphrodisiac. Dad had called it that because it amused him to do so. The formula didn’t heighten the bugs’ desire to mate. That was already at fever pitch. Dad must have blabbed, probably to the bartender in town, a University fink planted there to pick up information.

I

n the late afternoon Father took a nap and I read a book I had already read three times. It was about a distant-future Earth in which most life forms were integrated. The hero built a time-ma- chine and traveled into the past to the twenty-first century when man was beginning to experiment with cross-breeding. The experimental subjects had survived mostly through the ignorance and errors of the experimenters. At first they were called freaks. They lived in communes and were subjected to persecutions. The hero of the book was so horrified by the hatred directed toward him by homo sapiens that he fled a few centuries into the future. There he found the situation less violent but nevertheless distressing. The freaks were still a minority but their customs and habits were threatening the overall structure of society. For instance, a morse (man-horse) married a mog (man-dog) and then they quarreled about the cuisine. Or a masnake married a mird and they quarreled about the sleeping and working hours. Within certain species it was customary for the male to care for the children—when they married more conventional strangers the loving couples had fights after the babies came. In the meantime homo sapiens—what was left of him—was desperately trying to preserve his own traditions. At the end of the book the hero became disgusted with humanity and its myriad shapes and philosophies. He went home to the future, smashed his time-machine, sank his roots twenty feet into the ground, veiled his face with his weeping hair so the women would leave him alone and then he spent the next hundred years brooding.

I enjoyed reading the book again. It helped me to understand Father better. He wasn’t like the men who made bombs or deadly bacteria—he was aware of his moral dilemma. Should he give the world the aphrodisiac or not? He drank because he was doubledamned and he hated the world because it always peered over his shoulder.

I told him about the book while we ate supper.

“Talk!” he said, as he eyed his plate with revulsion. “Remember how you used to do it when you were small? Try to recreate those sounds.”

I gabbed, chattered, ran at the mouth. I said there was always a hero somewhere, like in the book. If a holocaust was observed by a single objective eye, that holocaust hadn’t occurred in vain. In other words, my dad should give up the aphrodisiac. The consequences would become mundane history. It wouldn’t be the same as dumping a gallon of botulism in the East River. Fallout from a nuclear explosion was a compound fracture of the moral femur. Like a bomb, the aphrodisiac was a potential bone-breaker, but only because people were stiff-necked and unimaginative.

“That isn’t the way to talk!” said Father. A piece of lettuce disappeared between his teeth. “You know damned well you’re doing it all under your breath. Nobody can hear you. You have every right to talk out loud. Use your larynx and your mind and your desire—” Spilling my milk, I said, “I will when you break all your bottles.”

I understood. He worried about things like anti-abortion groups. We all had a big wide wonderful planet in which to botch things up. Another word for world was trial-and-error.

“Don’t cry,” I said. “You’re like everybody you loathe. I love you. You care.”

“Come here.”

I shook my head.

He ate a boiled potato. “Come here.”

“It isn’t time. We have our family relationship after supper— while we watch TV, when the tower is shut up like a grave and all the kibitzers out there have put you out of mind until another day.”

L

ater we settled down in front of the TV and he held me in his lap.

“Whisper in my ear,” he said. “As loud as you can. Break my eardrum.”

I watched the cowboys shoot up the town. And in the meantime I smelled my father. The hair on his chest tickled my nose. He stroked my legs, my back, my hair, he pinched my cheek, pressed his nose against mine and we stared into each other’s eyes until mine crossed.

He was clever, but he gave me his mind when he fathered me, lent me too much of his savvy. He stroked me to draw me to him, desired for us to have a meeting of souls.

“I won’t say I can’t,” I said. “I’ll say I won’t. Does that make sense?”

“Don’t let them hurt you. You can be anything you want.”

“I don’t want to be anything. I just want to be.”

He took my chin between his big hands. “Say, ‘ah.’”

“Ah.”

“Not just with your mouth. Make the world hear.”

“Ah.”

“See my tears? Do you enjoy breaking your old dad’s heart?” “You’re a souse.”

“Say something to me out loud. Scream at me.”

“You ought to use a little soap and water to clean your ears. Christ, they’re like caves of dirty gold.”

He squeezed me until my ribs crunched. I howled, but soundlessly.

“One day we’ll leave this goddamned tower,” he said. “You think about that. We’ll walk down the main street of New York City. Hand in hand. When they all come out and say, ‘Doctor Dakis, you and your child are welcome in this world,’ that’s the day I’ll hand them the aphrodisiac.”

He believed 1 was suffering. I was. Said I, “On the day you break your bottles—that’s the day I’ll walk out of here with you. I’ll go on TV, if you like. I’ll yell through a microphone. Everybody from Guam to the Virgin Islands will hear me. Except we’ll have to come back here to the tower every night. It isn’t me who prevents my talking out loud. I do it for you. They don’t hurt me that much. But you hurt me, all the days of my life. I won’t talk because you drink. You drink because you’re jealous.”

I laid my head on his shoulder. “Don’t do that,” he said. Couldn’t be helped. Getting sleepy. Thumb in mouth. Suck, suck, it helped me to fantasize.Suck,suck.

Father tried to hold me back. “I’ll snuggle you all night, I’ll keep you warm. I’ll comfort you. Stay with me.”

Suck, suck. I dreamed—halfway here, halfway in another world. One was as bad or as good as the other since both were safely remote. I soared in luxurious comfort. Away in the distance Father called to me. 1 knew why. He was an almost perfect person. His one fault was that he was intolerant.

Someone called, and this time it was another. The voice was my imagination, or at least I thought it was. I never really asked.

Father held me fast. I yanked away. I left him to his bottles that waited for him everywhere in the tower. Father, I can’t help this thing. Maybe we both have a bridge to cross. Perhaps someday I’ll stay with you at night, you’ll break your bottles, we’ll go outside again, I’ll talk your head off, we’ll grow up together. I love you.

I opened the door at the end of the hall and closed it behind me. The big room was dark and silent, but not totally silent. The snakes in their cages watched me, warned me not to touch their screens. The guinea pigs thought it might be morning and whistled for breakfast, the dogs whimpered as nightmares threatened, the baboon cursed me for trailing my hand across his bars.

Stopping beside the last cage, I took off my clothes, opened the door, quietly slipped inside and walked to the cot in the corner. Her arms lifted and I fell into them as a sinner enters heaven: with exhausted happiness. Deep into her hairy bosom I nestled. We kissed, kissed, kissed. She licked my face, fumbled over my hairless body for nonexistent fleas. Carefully she squeezed, lest she destroy me. I lay with my cheek against my mother’s breast, felt her powerful arms tighten around me and I let the world go to hell while I slept. ★