Free The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories by Shelley Jackson Page B

Deja is resisting the pressure, though underlings have dropped hints that he may soften his stance in time for fall. We spoke to him in his Paris atelier.
    “ ‘Beauty must be convulsive or not at all, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘I give the people something to look at, like it or not.’
    “There was a flash of light and his pants disappeared. We saw what he meant.”
    “Boys don’t do this,” thought George, his soft breasts shrinking, parallel horizontal creases appearing in his stomach, a strange side effect of weight loss, his ribs appearing, knuckles appearing. “This is what girls do”; then he was filled with pity for girls, and admiration for their love of will over appetite.
    George was no longer looking very much like himself, hair dry and wispy, bruises on his arms, a broken blood vessel in his right eye from puking too hard, eye flooded with cardinal red, the whites not white, closing in on the pupil, which stayed blue, however. Lapis and ruby. He tried to keep his eyes lowered until this condition passed, so as not to flash his single soiled petal, his damned spot. He was appalled but slightly thrilled by this disfiguring mark. He celebrated by burning off all his pubic hair with one of Deja’s new samples. He was purifying.
    A guitar can be strung with nerve fibers. It is difficult to play, since nerves stretch: every note bends. The sound is unearthly, instantly recognizable, and not to everyone’s taste. It enjoyed a brief vogue in psychedelic music, then reestablished itself as a solo instrument, where problems of tuning are less evident. Very few modern pieces have been written for the nerve guitar, since the plaintive traditional melodies are so rich in variations and so difficult to master that most guitarists spend their lives learning to play them, and prize nuanced performance over an original tune. (Chanter Ramos, who in the seventies used to strap on a nerve guitar to head his fifteen-member band of multi-culti artistes, was a figure of fun to these musicians.) On stormy or sexy nights, when the plains hum, you can sometimeshear a solitary nerve guitarist start up a descant over the drone. There is no more piercing or desolate sound.
    George had sneered at this music when he was a kid. Now it was the only true and necessary music for him. He listened to it on headphones while he worked.
    “They call them ‘nervous systems.’ Baloney. They’re people,” George told his therapist. “The so-called
system
I fell in love with had more personality than I do. He loved tin lunch boxes, exotic weapons, tiny sugary cakes. He had delicacy and whimsy, but also the thirst for knowledge. Think Audrey Hepburn as Marie Curie: a pretty dress and a pocket full of radium.
    “He was a kind of tuning fork. He vibrated with a perfect pain. I trued my pain to his and my pleasures fell into harmony as well. I had never felt so much, but it was nothing beside what he could feel; he was a perfect receiver. But you could see that for him, pleasure also hurt. There wasn’t any difference, really, between pleasure and pain.”
    George got fired.
    “It’s not that you’re not doing a good job, because you are. It’s just that the other fellas find you … unnerving.” The boss had a good laugh, then clapped George on the shoulder. “Sorry about that!” He composed himself. “We like you, George, and it’s good sensitivity training for the guys to learn to work with someone with your condition, but frankly you get on their nerves and—sorry! Sorry! And output suffers. I’ve got to ask myself what’s best for the corporate body as a whole. I’m thinking it’ll be better for you, too, in the long run. You’ll be able to put in for unemployment, take a little break, change of pace. It’s gotta be good to get out of temptation’s reach—right?”
    As he left, he heard someone mutter, “Nervous Nellie!” Anuneasy laugh rippled around the room. He put on his headphones.
    “One minute, a bundle of