Michael Bishop - No Enemy But Time

Frustratingly slow progress, but progress nevertheless. I did not want to give up too soon.

According to Jeannette, I had not spoken my first recognizable word until I was well past two. Helen was far older than two, of course, but she had been exposed to bits and pieces of a comprehensive linguistic system only intermittently since my arrival. With our auspicious beginning (five “words” in as many days) as a base, given ten or twelve years, Helen might well acquire a real oratorical competence.

By the afternoon of our fifth day of language lessons, Helen’s five-word vocabulary seemed a historic accomplishment. I had not tried to teach her either my name or hers for fear she would ascribe to each an encompassing generic connotation, Joshua becoming “man” and Helen “woman.” Too, I had begun to feel a trifle guilty about having bestowed upon her the name of Thomas Babington Mubia’s favorite wife.

Or maybe about the fact that for most Westerners this name apotheosizes a standard of feminine beauty having nothing to do with my lady’s primeval negritude. Our earliest vocabularies corrupt, and what I had learned in the household of Jeannette Rivenbark Monegal had of course influenced—i.e., corrupted—my vision of the world. As for my first name, believing that Helen would be unable to pronounce it, I never spoke it aloud for her.

“ Mai mwah, ” said Helen when we broke for late-afternoon communion with the other Minids on the fifth day. “ Mai mwah.”

She had the mirror— her mirror, she had just called it—and before I could retrieve if from her, she left our hut to clamber along a winding parapet of stone to the hilltop where the other Minids were gathered.

The old man Jomo was sitting in the shade of the only tree up there, a fig tree, while his consort Guinevere searched his back for lice.

Helen shoved the mirror under Jomo’s nose. This act affected him as if she had peeled off his rubbery face and slapped him with it. He reared back, threw an arm around Guinevere, and stared at Helen aghast. I tried to grab the mirror away from Helen, but she murmured, “ Mai mwah,” and rebuffed me.

Jomo, recovering, eased the mirror from Helen’s hand and bemusedly ogled his own flat features.

Guinevere peered over his shoulder.

Other Minids began to gather, adults and children alike. Now that he no longer feared it, Jomo was jealous of his new possession. He had trouble ignoring the press of curious onlookers, many of whom squatted behind or to one side of him and extended their hands palm upward in patient entreaty. I stood aside and watched. Everyone wanted a moment with the mirror. Possession being nine-tenths of the law, no one moved to snatch the mirror from Jomo, but no one ceased begging, either. Even Alfie had squeezed into a forward position beneath the fig tree.

A slippery portion of himself in hand, Jomo devoured this delicacy while the others appealed to his better instincts for a taste of the same. How could he continue to refuse such a well-mannered plea? In fact, he could not. At last Jomo turned aside from Alfie and surrendered the mirror to his aged comrade Ham, who hunkered with his back to the tree trunk.

To demonstrate to himself the plastic amiability of the goon in the glass, Ham grabbed his nose, blinked his eyes, and tugged his earlobes. A dozen palms wobbled within a foot of his face, stoically demanding their turns, and finally Ham, like Jomo before him, gave in to community pressure. He passed the shaving mirror to Dilsey.

Despite his status as chieftain, Alfie was temporarily odd man out, for Dilsey handed the glass to Odetta, who relinquished it to her toddler manchild Zippy, who grew bored in a matter of seconds and let it slip into the clutches of the effervescent adolescent Mister Pibb, who yielded it to Roosevelt, who, perhaps in remembrance of our previous exchange of gifts, passed the fragile compact to me. Alfie, by now, was looking on with a lugubriousness that almost corralled my sympathy. However, I tore my gaze away, cried, “Wait here—I’ll be right back,” and hurried down the hillside to my hut. A moment later I was back among the Minids with an aerosol bomb of Colgate lime-scented shaving cream.

The habilines watched awe-stricken as I meringued my face with the shaving cream and then mischievously flicked lather hither and yon to witness their reactions. Horrified to see the lower half of my face foaming away, Bonzo and Gipper covered their eyes while the other youngsters gaped like spectators at an automobile wreck. Malcolm and Ham nervously palpated their own cheeks and chins to assure themselves the phenomenon was not contagious. Gibbering or singing, the womenfolk huddled against their mates for warmth or consolation. Helen, however, withdrew a good twenty feet, squatted on her heels, and put her arms around her knees.

Alfie sidled near. He extended his palm, a plea for my attention. I lifted the can of shaving cream and squirted a ball of foam into Alfie’s hand. He flinched but did not scuttle for safety.

Sniff, sniff.

The pungent scent of limes. This implied, even for a habiline, edibility. Seduced by the fragrance, Alfie tasted.

Pfaugh!

He spat out the offending foam and wiped his hand on the ground. Then his palm came up again, and I willingly gave him the aerosol bomb.

Suspiciously delighted, Alfie located the trigger atop the can and spilled into being between his feet a shin-high marshmallow monument. His thumb came up, and he and the Minids contemplated the result.

Everyone was impressed, even the architect. He carried the can to the fig tree and put an epaulet of foam on Emily’s shoulder. When she fled from his ministrations, scolding him for decorating her, Alfie turned on Daddy Ham and bearded the old man with a snowy dab. Guinevere knocked the can from Alfie’s grasp and kicked it between his legs to Malcolm, who, fielding it as gracefully as Maury Wills sucking up a grounder on the second hop, underhanded it to Fred. Fred festooned Mister Pibb with a rope of foam and vaulted into the fig tree. Alfie, Roosevelt, and Mister Pibb pursued him aloft. While the remaining Minids hooted at these inept brachiators, I went to Helen, lifted her to her feet, and led her back down the hillside to our tent.

By this diversion I had saved my mirror.

Looking over my shoulder, I saw the branches of the fig tree dripping with boas of evocative whiteness, almost as if it had snowed in this arid equatorial region of prehistoric Zarakal. A moment later the Minids came charging into New Helensburgh after us, releasing fluorocarbons into the Pleistocene atmosphere and plastering the cracks in our hut with shaving cream.

All that night the odor of decaying limes hung in the air, scenting our citadel, and in the morning the lumps of lather decorating our huts had taken on the honeycombed appearance of bleached and abandoned wasp nests. As for the can of shaving cream, I found it a day or two later in the branches of a small euphorbia bush at the bottom of the hill. Just as I had led Genly into accidental suicide, I had led his compatriots into the temptations of littering and aerosol warfare. C’est la vie.

Helen and I kept up our language lessons. The mirror, which earlier had enabled me to confirm the forward placement of her reproductive organs, continued to prove a valuable aid. Unfortunately, its principal value lay in maintaining Helen’s interest, for she could not properly shape the words I tried to teach her, and her acquisition of an English vocabulary had stalled at ten or eleven words.

Love , if you do not count pronouns, was the only abstract term among this number, but whether she recognized its possibilities as a verb, too, I am not yet ready to declare. She could parrot a sentence I had taught her containing this word, however, and I have often consoled myself on melancholy nights by pretending that she knew exactly what she was doing.