Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

world begin to think you something different than what you are. Or, perhaps, for fear the world might begin to guess anything at all about your nature. Myself, I have so little use for the world, and less use still for the world’s ill-considered opinions, and, compared with the simple fact of you, I am no more than a raindrop set against the sea’s most unfathomable abyss. I cannot even comprehend your apparent concern with appearances.
    “Would you read it to me?” you ask, lazily teasing between thumb and forefinger what might at first glance be mistaken for your penis. “If I asked nicely, would you let me hear your story.”
    “But it isn’t finished,” I say, and in hardly an instant my delight has become anxiety. Because it isn’t finished, and you have never before asked me to read you anything I’ve written, and suddenly it all seems so contrived and trite and superficially grotesque, all the things I’ve committed to those pages. “In truth, it’s barely even properly started, really.”
    “But you just said you don’t imagine it can continue very much longer, this anthrophagous tryst you’ve concocted, so how can you be so terribly far from the end? The poor woman must already be nearing expiration, and here you tell me you’re about to take a lung.”
    “She was a medical student,” I say, hoping that if I offer a few more details you will be satisfied and so forget, or let slide, your request to hear me read. “The cannibal’s lover, I mean. That’s how they met. She frequently attended lectures on human physiology and pathology, and also demonstrations given by the surgeon. The student—who would soon, of course become the lover—had excruciating dreams in which she was the cadaver lying motionless and exposed on the surgeon’s table, flayed raw before the eyes of her classmates. In her dreams, she felt all those eyes oil her, and the scalpel blade, and the dexterous hands of the surgeon. One thing led to another—”
    “As they say,” you sigh, interrupting me. “Dear, you only need answer, ‘No, I don’t wish to read you my story.’ It was not an order. At least, I do not believe I phrased it as an order. Perhaps, in my excitement—” And here you pause and stop teasing yourself long enough to find a more comfortable position in among the pillows. “—maybe, I sounded too eager. I merely thought you might welcome an audience for a change, for the words themselves, in the order you have placed them, rather than squeezing them into summaries and approximations.”
    “I think if I really wanted an audience, I’d probably try to find a publisher.”
    You take a very deep breath and then exhale so slowly that breathing out seems to last almost forever. “Unless, love, you are too afraid, or too intimidated at the thought of criticism or rejection.” Here you smile a third time, and tonight your teeth would put a starving hyena to shame.
    “I’m not afraid,” I say, telling you another lie, though I cannot say for certain if you know this one for what it is. “I do not write for anyone but me. And I only share my stories with you because you ask.”
    “Fair enough,” you say. “I did ask. I asked because you are always so awfully intent, so diligent at your work. Rut I find it admirable, that you do not crave an audience, that you have no need of listeners or of readers or of printed volumes to find satisfaction. That you do this simply because it pleases you to do so.”
    “It keeps me busy,” I reply, “when you’re out. When I am alone.” You watch me silently for a time, your fingers still busy with the elaborate folds and creases and protuberances of your genitalia (though you are engaged in nothing so deliberate or directed towards an end as the act of masturbation). In the candlelight, the shadows conceal so much, and it is difficult to be sure where your long fingers end and those most secret regions of the temple of your body begin. There is the undeniable,