The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [36]
“Now,” I say. I turn it on its back. Normally I would spread-eagle the legs with pins, but I want to keep the boys’ interest. I nod for one each to hold a leg. “Let’s find the heart,” I say. With a sharp knife I cut through the belly skin, peeling back the flaps to reveal the viscera. The boys press closer, crowding me, but I don’t ask them to step back.
“You see, here,” I say. “The oesophagus, the windpipe. Feel your own.”
The boys touch their throats.
“See the movement, the contraction around the ribs? In the membrane, here.”
Movement in the back of the hall. I don’t look up.
“This will continue for some time, even after death.”
The boys part for Alexander, who walks up to the table.
“You see there isn’t much meat. A little by the jaws, here, and here, by the root of the tail. Not much blood, either, but some around the heart. Show me the heart.”
Alexander points into the chameleon’s body.
I make a sudden fist and hold it up in front of his face. His eyes flare in surprise. Around me the boys go still. “Your heart is this big,” I tell Alexander. With what I will always think of as the second blade from the left, ears—the ghost of my father’s grip worn into the wooden handle—I detach the bloody nut of the lizard’s heart and hold it out to him. He takes it slowly, looks at me, and puts it in his mouth.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” he says. “I was with my mother.”
Shorry, it emerges through the mouthful. There’s blood on one corner of his mouth like a trace of fruit. He chews and chews and swallows with difficulty.
“That’s all right,” I say. “Are you going to vomit?”
He nods, then shakes his head.
“Shall we have a look at the brain?”
The animal’s brain is reduced, through the boys’ industrious prickings and slicings, to a substance like meal. Alexander has recovered from his fit of petulance or penitence or peckishness or whatever it was and is busy impaling bits of brain on his knife and smearing them on the arm of the boy next to him. Another boy flicks some brain into Alexander’s hair. They’re all giggling now, jostling, feinting at each other with their brainy knives, normal boyish behaviour I infinitely prefer to their creepy militarism. We move on to the lungs, the kidneys, the ligaments, the bowel, the lovely doll-knuckle-bones of the spine. Alexander sneaks glances at me and when our eyes meet we both look quickly away. Ours is after all a kind of marriage, arranged by his father. I wonder which of us is the bride.
“Who can tell me what a chameleon is?” I ask.
“An animal.”
“A lizard.”
I collect my father’s scalpels from the boys and wipe them slowly, meticulously, as I was taught. “I had a master, when I was not much older than you. He was very interested in what things were. In what was real, if you like, and what”—I gesture at the remains of the chameleon—“was perishable, what would pass away and be lost. He believed that there were two worlds. In the world we see and hear and touch, in the world we live in, things are temporary and imperfect. There are many, many chameleons in the world, for instance, but this one has a lame foot, and that one’s colour is uneven, and so on. Yet we know they are all chameleons; there is something they share that makes them alike. We might say they have the same form; though they differ in the details, they all share in the same form, the form of a chameleon. It is this form, rather than the chameleon itself, that is ideal, perfect, and unchanging. We might say the same of a dog or a cat, or a horse, or a man. Or a chair, or a number. Each of these exists in the world of forms, perfectly, unchangingly.
“My master’s theory was ingenious, but it had many problems. For instance, how are we able to perceive the forms, if we are of this world and they are not? And if two similar objects share a form, then must there not be yet another form of which all three partake? And then a fourth form, and a fifth, and so on? And what of change? How can a perfect, unchanging world be the ideal form of this world, where change surrounds us?”
From outside comes the