“Oh. So you have to get laid by a different woman every day or you die?”
“Right. And there are other things, too. Like the act has to be one conducive to procreation. Otherwise it’s no go, my body can’t reinterpret something that doesn’t beget new life. You know what I mean? So if a girl makes me wear a jimmy I just poke a hole in it and it’s a-ok.”
“So you’re going around impregnating hookers?”
“No. It’s not like that, man. I can’t impregnate them. I need the procreation for myself. If it transferred to a consensual procreation thing I wouldn’t regenerate.”
“What about children, then? You can’t have a child?”
“No, man. No way. Impossible.”
He fell silent for a while after that. Suddenly I felt like I was looking at a void, not a human. He’d let the rabbit go, apparently.
“And what about diseases?”
“Ha,” Harlan’s lifeless laugh. “I can’t get those anymore.”
“Can you give them?”
“That’s a damn good question. I don’t think so.”
We talked a little bit longer before the receptionist called him in. He patted me on the back and said he was glad to meet another experiment. If I ever needed anything, he said never to hesitate calling on him. He gave me a permanent address somewhere just outside the city. Although he traveled a lot, he always returned there to write personal letters. Then he bid me good day and strutted to the office in the next room.
I waited for a short while, debating the veracity of our conversation. Harlan certainly seemed to believe what he was telling me, to which I deduced might be the very heart of the experiment. When he exited he was beaming an unhealthy grin, looking at me with only the corners of his eyes. I asked why he was so elated and he proceeded to show me a picture of a penis. All I could do was shrug and then he explained that Grummel was paying for a surgery to help out Harlan’s “charm”. Apparently, and I only understood half of the procedure, he was going to essentially have a penis transplant. And after he gave me all the details that I most likely consciously forgot, he again brandished the picture of his penis-to-be, fishing for compliments I suppose. I probably commented on the girth or something, but eventually asked where they had found someone to donate such an organ. To this Harlan said some anecdote about black markets, hospital insurance policies, and poor bastards.
After he’d skipped away, I thought about black market penis deals. I didn’t like them, I decided. I furtively patted my crotch to reassure it that no other organ could replace the one I was born to wield. That made the flutter in stomach slightly subside.
I was called into the office after a prolonged wait, one that I guessed had been of the secretary’s sole discretion. The inside of the office looked like the broad shoulders of a business suit: square, firm, defined seams, and posture. I approached the lone man behind the desk; he with white hair and moustaches that were sharp like a swashbuckler’s on a face like an iguana or some other enlightened reptile, dressed in something like a lilac kimono-toga-suit. Actually it looked like he was wearing a business suit and gotten tangled in a giant curtain, but he sported the apparel with purpose.
A hand with whiskers unfolded from his curtain sleeve and gestured me to sit. For five minutes he watched me, twice licking his lips, three times tapping his cheek with all of his fingers, and four times clearing his throat. Once he burped, but this didn’t seem to be part of whatever procedure he was running to settle our introduction. Afterward he stood and said, “No, no, please stay seated,” even though I had never moved to stand. He circumnavigated the desk three times as if he were alone in his office, the curtain trailing him and once snagging on a corner of the desk which he calmly ignored and retracted a few steps to correct. Next, he took a stethoscope from his desk drawer and wore it in one ear. The chestpiece he held to his throat so to auscultate while he spoke.
The speech that followed was delivered in a stentorian voice as if he were addressing a large crowd. Even his eyes were off to the back of the room. It hardly made any sense beyond the first few welcoming sentences. Eventually he began talking of words and the importance to express oneself. Following was a theory that words defined what we saw, and without them we could not see. For this reason he said that animals could not truly see and were lost in a “labyrinth of linear id”. Voice was thus the great accomplice to the eyes, informing the brain to ultimately “see”. It is sad, he said, that animals should live without seeing one another, but only acknowledging one another. Speech was the great lubricator of creation, and the more words we welcomed into the English language the greater and more dimensions we could witness. He said that people of different language would never truly see one another because they could not understand the other’s syntax, and that translators were the world’s greatest liars. Ghouls, he even ventured to call them. Ghouls that snicker at their own mutilations. To learn every language would enlighten one to see all current perspective and dimensions, but also plunge them into a soulless lonely hell where no man or woman could ever understand a true need ever again. Phrases were language’s most recent invention, he continued. Although currently phrases massacred individual words, created diluted meaning to their initial makers, he said that phrases would transcend and become new primordial meaning. Here he paused, lowered the stethoscope and asked me if I knew there were initially only twenty-five letters in the alphabet. I started to question but he swiftly replaced the chestpiece to his throat and said that it was true. The first speakers would recite the alphabet, singing “a, b, c, d,” etc. as language. Then they reorganized the pattern. Then the first inventor realized there were letters between the letters, and the “w” was born from connecting two u’s. The same man had tried to invent the “nn” but was stifled by horrified conservatives. It is said that in Spain they took heed of this letter and named it “n~”. From then on, however, it didn’t matter. Combining letters became too easy, inventing purpose with each conglomerate group of letters. Imagine, not only a double u, but a triple u. Soon words were invented. And the rest is history.
Upon finishing his speech, which had grown in intensity and volume, he cleared his throat. With his left hand he smacked his desktop with an upward palm and the rest of his body erect, jiggling his iguana neck. Then he slunk into his chair and stared at me. Three minutes passed. I said I had at one point taken a French class, but he waved his hand, telling me not to speak.
He stood again and circled the desk two times. On the last go around I saw a giant piece of lint clinging to his curtain tail. I almost picked it off, but decided better of it. Again he withdrew an item from his desk. It was a calculator and a Menorah.
This next speech was even more incoherent and held no introductory statement or segue. He asked if I had heard of the Ashkenazi Jews. I didn’t respond. He claimed that Judaism had helped form the better part of what he called “accepted science” through the likes of Einstein, Max Born, Sigmund Freud and other names I can’t remember. It was through their perspective on life and faith that they acquired a better understanding between the cracks. Judaism their alphabet, science their words, phrases still being built. All from this direction our knowledge now flows. No other languages present. From here his terms got ambiguous, nebulous. At least three times he used the term “relative construct” pertaining- to my best conjecture- to the world. He wrapped back around and informed me that the mistake was that people wanted to build a religion instead of the religion, or the fact that they still used the infamous term religion at all. Science, too, was becoming an infamous term. The world needed a similar construct. A conglomerate of language, philosophy, spirit, and even food.
Somewhere in the middle of the speech I scratched my neck and grew uncomfortable. This man sounded like a fucking anti-Semite. A Nazi. Holy shit. I had been working for a Nazi. I scrunched up in my chair and let him finish, dodging the crazy lecture like overhead fire or shrapnel. Mortars of fascism, grenades of prejudice, and bombshells of intolerance all flew by me, exploding around me and trying to destroy my humane thoughts. Trying to destroy my compassion and expose the hard bone and grind of intellectualization behind it. He would char me