Fiction Issue 3
Alchemy
by Lynne Barrett
William Averill puts down his pipette and checks the beaker of ruby liquid of which he has made, yes, precisely eight ccs more than last time. Will this dose let him stay (finally, does he dare?) in that state, perfervid and carefree, from which he fell last Monday morning, when he found himself hunched, trembling, among a tumble of discarded orange crates. All he could recall of the weekend was twirling under a canopy threaded with tiny violet lights, and hearing a woman’s laughter, sharp as a bark. His moustache was full of the fragrances of beer and overripe banana. He raised his head and saw he was crouched in the rusty shadow of the dumpster behind Jimmy’s Eastside Diner on Biscayne Boulevard, not far from his neighborhood.
He wore his own loose shorts and an unfamiliar tee stenciled with tropical flowers. His white linen shirt was gone, and—he patted himself down—the billfold he’d filled with cash, leaving his wallet and identification in his dresser. He wore grubby flip-flops instead of his running shoes, but, even so, he moved into a jog and headed homeward, keeping to the street that ran behind the motels and restaurants of the boulevard. He slipped through the first of the palm-planted strips with which his neighborhood association had blocked off all but the one entrance street where the guard gate monitored cars going into Aqua Marina. Still, anyone could pass through on foot, unobserved, as he had, late last Friday, and did again, returning.
At the roots of the tallest hibiscus in his yard, under a hunk of coral rock, he found his keys, clung to by tiny purple snails. He unlocked the back door, switched off the alarm, and felt his dignity again close horribly around him.
He is someone others listen to, or pretend to as they doodle at department meetings. Someone the young openly ignore, drowsing in the classroom, refusing the glorious scripture of the molecules, simply because it issues from the mouth of a man who is tallowy and grim. To them, he knows, he is a visible lesson, the consequences of a boyhood wrongly spent. They can’t see that, since those early days in the family basement in Syracuse with the chemistry set, all he ever wanted was to explode.
Last January, on the morning of his fiftieth birthday, he studied himself in the mirror, remembering the soft face and carroty hair for which he was taunted in his youth. What happened to his lips? When, exactly, had the hairs of his moustache and eyebrows, the lank strands on his head, begun to emerge from him as tarnished silver?
So he turned, in the spring months as the mangoes ripened in the yard, to the old, derided texts, to the Book of Stones of Jabbir Ibn Hayyan in which he deciphered the hidden messages, learning the secret of the ruddy principle, the al-iksr rubedo, which unites the limited with the unlimited. He lifted weights in the Florida room, strengthening himself for adventure, and trotted through the shady streets of Aqua Marina with none suspecting what journey he contemplated. And then, last week, he concocted the tincture of transformation and tried his first, cautious dose. Too cautious. He thinks he will find her again, the laughing woman, or another like her. He has remembered that there was something about a monkey. Perhaps she compared him to a monkey? Or had a monkey as a pet? It is all there, on the other side of a thin curtain.
Now, again, it is Friday evening. William has decanted his elixir into a deep glass mug, which he will rinse carefully before he leaves the house, so no trace will be found, if he does not return. He has tidied up all evidence of his work, and placed his books on shelves among so many others no one will know which holds the secret. He will conceal his keys, of course, in case he does, again, come home, but he is ready for what this attempt may bring. He has daubed his hair with auburn dye and washed himself in lotions of apricot and plum. He has put on new garments of linen over a money belt from Aventura Mall. He tilts the beaker to his mouth, frightened, eager, ready. He has only to dissolve himself to reach the self who’s been forever waiting.
