House of Holes (34 page)

Lila Says It’s Almost Time to Go

L
ila stood on the dais, her arms raised. “Thank you all for coming,” she said. “I hope you’ll be back next year.” A deep foaming whirlpool had formed in the middle of the White Lake. Some of the guests were beginning to paddle their boats toward it. It was the group exit portal, and it made a distant roaring sound.

“One last event, though,” Lila said. “Cardell, are you here? Will you please come up?”

Cardell leapt the three steps up to the stage.

“Is that an egg in your pocket, hon?”

“Yes, it is, as a matter of fact,” Cardell said. “A silver egg. From my friend Jackie.” He handed it to Lila, who set it down on a folded washcloth.

“Now let’s let it hatch,” said Lila. “The egg of love, ladies and gentlemen. Farewell.”

The Silver Egg Hatches

G
allanos woke up curled in what he later found out was a small egg made of silver. Around him was a woman. Their heads were sometimes at opposite ends of the egg, and sometimes they stared at each other, blinking their silver luminous eyes. They floated in a shadowy fluid. They drank it, they breathed it. Their bodies were dull silver.

Gallanos seemed to have forgotten how to talk. He re-membered that he’d had a former life—that there was a space for him somewhere that wasn’t a silver person sharing an egg, but he had no details. He couldn’t recollect what had happened.

The first time that she smiled was when they were both feeling especially cramped. Either the egg was getting smaller, or they were getting a little larger. They fell asleep, and when Gallanos woke his hand was cupping the silver chalice of her breast. He pulled it away, horrified that he’d been so forward, and bumped his elbow on the slippery curving wall of their enclosure.

And then she smiled and shrugged: Oh well, it can’t be helped.

Gallanos opened his mouth and tried to make a sound. Nothing came out. They slept, and they breathed the glutinous liquid that gave them sustenance, and they slept some more, and sometimes they smiled and nodded and shrugged, and then gradually they developed a sort of language of gestures. They tapped to say “I’m going to sleep now, good night.” And when they woke up they tapped and waved to say good morning.

Mellinnas was very concerned about her hair, which was marvelous fine silvery angel hair stuff that she moved and sometimes adroitly twisted into a small bun. He tapped her shoulder when she had arranged her hair especially well. They were never not touching. They lived inches away from each other, but they couldn’t smell each other, and they couldn’t talk.

And then one day they discovered kissing. Their lips found each other and smooched and lipped over each other and centered, and Gallanos couldn’t believe how much Mellinnas was giving him with her soft metallic shiny perfect lips.

After a long day of kissing, Gallanos told her that he was going to go to sleep, and she bade him with her taps and looks that she was going to sleep, too. But that night he dreamed that she was wearing clothes and wasn’t silver and that they were both in a bedroom, and she was unbuttoning her clothes and then she pulled his head down so that he could listen to her heart beating. He could smell her skin and hear her talking and telling him interesting facts using sound waves, and suddenly he felt an incredibly pleasurable dollop of liquid happiness traveling in his transmission bump. Then he woke and looked down and saw that his silver cock was much larger than normal and that it was sticking out at an angle from his body, though subsiding. He was alarmed, and he looked over at her, but her eyes were closed, and she was sleeping. Soon the stiffness went away, and he went back to sleep.

Then one day they were jostled greatly and thrown into confusion. They looked at each other with alarm; it was clear that their enclosure was being tossed around on some ocean or tumbled down some steep incline. There was a sudden sharp concussion and an inrush of blinding searing light, which poured in as their fluid suspension slowly leaked away. They lay cupped and sprawling in one half of a silver egg that had cracked apart. After a moment, they stood. Their hands found each other. They were a couple, newly hatched.

Loud sounds blossomed from enormous fleshy flushed faces, and Gallanos and Mellinnas were frightened. Moreover, their silver skin began to dry, and as it did they felt an almost unbearable warmth. They held on to each other tightly for protection but also because it soothed the burning of their acclimatizing skin. Gallanos’s penis was swollen and hot, and it seemed almost without their knowing it to slide inside Mellinnas. Then they were tightly embraced, a writhing ball of silver. The huge faces came closer to watch, and the silver couple could hear enormous booming noises, which they later understood were speech. But all they could do was move together to try to adjust to the shock of being exposed to air.

Gallanos lay down on the surface of something hard and smooth, with a grain to it—the wooden tabletop—and his eggmate squashed herself to him and moved with amazing flexibility around and around on his molten twig. She opened her mouth, and he opened his, and then as feelings they hardly remembered gushed through them they pushed against the muteness of their throats until finally a series of small cries came out, strange uncertain sounds that increased in volume and pace until, as they reached the final throes of their lovemaking, they became groans of joy. The faces, watching, blinked and smiled. Gallanos and Mellinnas crawled onto a folded washcloth and fell asleep.