Michael Bishop - No Enemy But Time

Among chimpanzees the females develop cumbersome sexual swellings to signal their readiness to mate (“pink ladies,” Jane Goodall once called the possessors of these fragrant passion flowers), but habiline women, naked under their long and scanty hair, were fortunate in never having to flaunt such gaudy carnal corsages.

I, meanwhile, was unfortunate in having no clue to Helen’s designs, if any, on my person. After setting my pistol aside, I drew her to me. Although stronger than I, with hands capable of ripping apart the rib cage of a hippopotamus carcass, Helen did not resist. Her head nuzzled my armpit, and we lay back together on the grasses of my pallet. I think she was listening to my heartbeat, which was bongoing calypso rhythms in the constricted drum of my chest. She listened for a long time. The singing of the melancholy habilines ceased, and the sunset glow on the horizon beyond New Helensburgh gave way to a lustrous eggplant color and a dot-to-dot patterning of stars. Soon Helen was asleep. Putting my uncertainty about her intentions on hold, I too finally slept.

At dawn I awoke to find Helen staring down at me with those bright, smoky eyes. All my previous doubts and apprehensions came surging back. What did she want of me? What did I want of her? How were we to bridge the chasms of anatomy, angst, and animality separating us? A gray light filtered into my hut through the gaps in its thatching, and it seemed to me that Helen and I were tree mice, primed for some rapacious giant’s lightning grab.

“What?” I asked Helen. “What do we—?”

Helen lowered her eyes, meaningfully rather than demurely. Her gaze came to rest on my tattered bush shorts. If I could pass the physical, I would qualify in her estimation as a suitable husband. Since coming among the Minids—as, initially, with Babington at Lolitabu—I had been guarded about my biological functions, and to date Helen had had no assurance that I was not as neuter as a Kewpie doll under my Fruit of the Looms. Although I cannot ordinarily do business under the eyes of strangers, Helen was no longer a stranger, and with trembling fingers I moved to allay her doubts.

First, though, I unknotted the red bandanna about my throat and showed it to Helen. She remembered it from our first meeting, when I had attempted to win her over with a bauble and she had spurned the offer by raising both her hackles and her club. This morning, though, the offer charmed her, and she allowed me to tie the bandanna around her neck as a betrothal gift. Indeed, it constituted her entire trousseau. The moment lengthened, and I will never forget the way she looked as we shared it.

Even with my shorts off, I was not entirely a Minid. My mind kept tracking back and forth, sorting data, printing unflattering labels on my natural appetites: bestial, perverse, reprehensible, depraved . My parents, bless their souls, would have been appalled by my yearnings, and an old country boy like our Wyoming landlord Pete Grier would have seen more poetry in a farm boy’s hasty violation of an indifferent heifer than in my adult attraction to the willing Helen Habiline.

Helpless to prevent what was going to occur, I tried to make a concession to both Good Sense and Conscience. In so doing I confused Helen about the exact nature of my masculinity.

Naked and erect, I rolled aside from Helen, grabbed a foil-wrapped condom from my first-aid kit, and fumbled the ring of folded latex out of its packaging. Then I unrolled the condom’s milky second skin over the instrument of our impending union and turned to face my bride. Helen was taken aback. So was I. My sincerity was suddenly suspect, even to myself. Despite the deep affection and healthy lust that the Minid woman had engendered in me, my recourse to a prophylactic declared that I had certain nagging doubts that annulled the purity of my passion. Was I afraid that I might impregnate Helen? No. All the available evidence suggested that she was barren. No, I was not thinking of Helen. The specter of venereal disease, age-old scourge of the promiscuous and the incontinent, had struck from my subconscious and I had grabbed for my first-aid kit. Now, I was momentarily unmanned by the pettiness of my behavior. Helen looked at me wide-eyed. I was a melting Tootsie Roll in a casing of wrinkled liquid latex.

“You probably think I’ve got to perform lickety-damn-split-quick or I can’t do anything at all,” I told her, embarrassed.

Cautiously Helen reached out and touched the ring of my condom. She had undoubtedly seen the everted skins of snakes cast on the ground or caught in the forks of trees, but undoubtedly none of the males of her acquaintance had ever reversed the ecdysial process in this priapic particular. Soon her curiosity overcame her fear, and she drew her finger around the ring. Flash-freezing my ardor and unwrinkling my second skin, I saluted, greatly startling her.

“Give me a minute, Helen—I’ll take it off.”

This was easier promised than performed. Electrolysis, I swear, plucks hair less painfully. But I managed.

Off, the prophylactic still fascinated Helen. She took it from my hands and lifted it over her head as if it were one of those repulsive delicacies favored by the French. She refrained, thank Ngai, from popping it into her mouth, and I took it back. Inspired by the notion that our get-together was a celebration as well as a solemn rite, I inflated the condom’s pale skin to the size of a bowling ball and tied it off at the ring as my mother had once tied off party balloons. Electronically Tested for Reliability read a legend near the ring. Buoyant, my condom and I demonstrated the innate risibility of tumescence.

Helen’s eyes grew wider. Her bottom lip dropped. Then she snapped her mouth shut and reached for the balloon. However, she must have scraped its taut skin with a fingernail, for the next thing I heard was an ear-splitting P*O*P*! and Helen’s involuntary cry of distress. I went down almost as fast as my condom.

Terrified, Helen rolled away to the wall, clutching her knees and biting her lovely deep-purple lip.

Tossing aside the illegible postscript of my French letter, I hurried to apply to her forehead the frank of my consoling kiss. Before Helen could respond, Jomo and Alfie burst uninvited into the hut.

“Jesus!” I exclaimed.

Then I saw their faces. Jomo and Alfie were reacting to the report of the punctured condom, and their bleak expectation—another habiline shot dead—Helen’s huddled form seemed all too neatly to fulfill. I struggled to pull the lady upright and myself together.

“It wasn’t the pistol, brothers. We popped a balloon. Nothing to worry about. Only a balloon…”

Talking soothingly to Helen, I got her to a sitting position. Jomo and Alfie squatted in front of her, looking glances of silent inquiry into her eyes, and she replied by looking back at them the answers they seemed to want. The crisis was past. Helen was alive and well.

The men, noticing my nakedness, scrutinized me skeptically. If they persisted in their contemplation, I reflected, my plumbing would be on the fritz for a week. What I had neither intimidated nor impressed them. After looking at each other with the open-mouthed “play faces” common to young chimpanzees and the children of Kalahari Bushmen, they left the hut and apparently reported what they had seen to their compatriots outside. A moment later, the Minids were serenading the dawn sky with a hoarse, many-throated aubade.

I returned to Helen. We settled back on my pallet in each other’s arms. As the strands of untutored habiline singing gradually unraveled into silence, my bride let me coax her round. I let her coax me round, too. Genly was dead, but we were alive, and the difference was crucial. With the echoes of twentieth-century disapproval dying in my mind, I embraced Helen, put my lips to her brow, and somehow succeeded in joining with her on an elemental level that only a few weeks ago would have struck even me as unthinkable.