with others. She dreamed of love-oceans and cotton-candy clouds,
coffee ice-cream and legal documents written in frosting. She slept all
day, her eyelids fluttering like pinned and dying bugs.
This was the mother that Colin grew up with. When she died of
heart failure a week after his eleventh birthday, He got drunk for the
first time at her wake. Colin felt that as the pale liquid entered him,
her spirit embraced him from the inside out.
Years later scientists discovered that human breast milk
contained benzodiazepines, a class of drug that includes the popular
muscle relaxant Valium. Benzodiazepines reduced anxiety and motor
activity by inhibiting an area in the brain known as the GABA
receptor complex. Consequently, breast milk was not only nourishing
for babies, but soothing for them as well, helping them to bond with
the mother as well as take a rest from being continually freaked-out
all day.
To the point: Alcohol worked on exactly the same site in exactly
the same way.
Poets compared bottles and breasts for eons, but science proved
that it was more than just a fanciful connection. One found in a tipple
the same thing they once found in a nipple. Only, it wasn’t the same
thing. There was no touching, for instance. Maybe that was why
drinking was so often followed by desperate displays of affection, or
sometimes inconsolable fits of crying.
Colin had not wept since his mother’s funeral and his stabs at
ardor had been mostly awkward and fruitless. But a consumptive life,
lived fully, offered its share of substitutes.
“Promise me something, Roy,” Colin said as they stared at injured
Aphrodite, and Roy, drunk, said that he would.
“If you ever break from my father and start your own company,
you let me know and I’ll be right there with you.”
“Sure. I’ll let you know,” Roy said, draining the last of the tequila.
He thought it a fantastic notion that something like that might ever
happen. He was of a disposition too dreamy to embark on anything
as roguish as that.
ABYSSINIA
80
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