Fully Half by Pacifico Geronimo III

Fully Half

essay by Pacifico Geronimo III

I’m a few years old, sitting in a bathtub full of warm water and bubbles, a rubber toy gripped in my hand, and the drip from the spout is creating a sound so loud it very nearly becomes the room with each new drop. The toy I’m holding is a hollow, rubber skipper. He is wearing a yellow rain slicker and matching cap, his little rubber hand raised to his little rubber face and his little rubber mouth is open in an O, as if shouting through a storm. His skin, which is really just paint, is the same color as my mom’s: whitish pink, or pinkish white. The same color as most all of the adults in my life, except for my father. If the universe were simple, I might be a color halfway between my mother’s white and my father’s dark, but my arms against the porcelain are as dark as dad’s. The universe, it seems, is a trickster: I am half white, and not white at all. My penis is under the surface of the water, darker even than the rest of me. I flick it. I submerge the rubber skipper to place him near to it, and he is a head taller, like a grownup standing beside a child. But like the shouting skipper, my penis has a character to it, this thing between my legs has a mysterious personality. It resembles the plant from a movie I love, a plant from space from a movie my parents for some reason allow me to watch, who starts out so cute, just an eyeless, voiceless bud, pursing its green lips for sympathy, trying to get its owner to feed it more blood after it tastes a drop from his sliced finger. That plant loves blood so much that by the end of that film it is begging to be fed entire human bodies. I’m pretty sure my penis will never learn to speak, so I wonder if it isn’t, as far as body parts go, entirely pointless, just there, under the bubbly bath water, more like a plant in real life than the monster plant from the movie; more like the mushrooms that grow from the moist dirt under my father’s cars on the side-yard, after a monsoon. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the dripping stops, and it is as if the silence in the room has risen up like a wave. Water sags on the lip of the spigot. I lower myself into the

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warmth of the bath, starting to suspect no one is coming for me. I wonder if I will be forced to climb from the tub and dry myself. There, in that roaring silence, I recognize the sound of my parents’ voices in a faraway room, and with more than a little relief, I lift the skipper to a perch at the edge of the tub, free to turn my concerns to those of a tiny man on the edge of a giant, surging sea, and just like that have forgotten all about the secret truth I just found, here, at the center of my universe.

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