by John Haskell
Or my own yearning and sadness.
Whatever it was it seemed to be pure. I wanted to talk to the tree. I knew that talking to a tree was not a normal thing to do, and yet I felt like reassuring the tree, comforting the tree as it stood before me. Longing is the desire for something unattainable, and while I couldn’t afford to long for Anne, because that implied unattainability, I could—and did—feel longing for the tree.
I stayed there awhile and then I walked back to the tent. Feather and Fletcher were inside the tent, sitting cross-legged on the sleeping bags, their hands on each other’s thighs. They invited me in and Fletcher told me about the LSD in the punch. Which didn’t matter to me. I sat down, also cross-legged, creating a triangle inside the tent, and we didn’t speak. The party voices were audible in the distance.
Fletcher turned toward Feather and looked at her. And then he looked at me. I looked at him and she looked at me, and we were all looking at each other in a way that made it unclear who was looking at who, or whom. Either way, there was a lot of looking going on. And at some point Fletcher slid across the sleeping bags, and with his fingertips, he began touching the base of my neck, pressing against my spine and spiraling his fingers down the bones of my back.
In the car, when they’d talked about sexuality, they’d talked about a desire that transcended mental and emotional and even physical accoutrements. They’d talked about the possibility of reaching that place of untainted desire, and now it seemed they were practicing it.
My encounter with the tree—the smell of the pine sap was still sticking to my fingers—had left me calm and surprisingly peaceful. As Fletcher continued kneading my back I was facing Feather, who was sitting very still, looking at me, letting me look at her, and something in her look, or the permission in her look, let me change her, or try to change her, into something else. And it wasn’t that Feather became Anne, or that the bones in her wrist and the hairs on her arm became Anne’s bones and Anne’s hairs, but because I wanted Anne, even though she was Feather, I was feeling the excitement of being with Anne.
That’s when Fletcher left the tent. He nodded to me as if he was giving me something, giving me an experience or a wish, or giving me Feather. He seemed aware of what was happening. He said, “If that’s what you want,” and what he was doing by saying “If that’s what you want” was stepping aside. I don’t imagine it was easy for him, but he was trying, I think bravely, to live the principles he advocated. Then he left the tent.
When he was gone Feather turned so that she was facing me directly. When she’d adjusted her position so that she was sitting close enough to reach out, she did. Our eyes were fixed on each other and she reached out, took my hand, and placed it on her heart. It wasn’t exactly her heart because it was higher than her actual heart and more toward the edge of her chest, so that beneath the material of her shirt—between my hand and her heart—I could feel the outline of her breast. She was saying, “Feel my heart,” and although that was something Anne would never say, I wanted to feel the heart, and feel the person, or radiance even, emanating from that heart.
Because in my mind it was partially Anne’s heart, it was also Anne’s breast, and I felt something stirring. I felt the stirring of desire, but every time I tried—or thought about—acting on this desire, I thought of Anne, and then the desire faded. And Feather seemed to understand this. It didn’t seem to be a problem for her. I was all part of weeding out impurities. She was willing to accept whatever my so-called impurities might be, without judgment. And because human experience is full of complexity it’s possible to have simultaneously conflicting impulses.
Which I did.
I say conflicting because certain of these impulses—about what I should do, or ought to do (or about Anne)—were holding me back, separating me from where part of me wanted to go. And the reason I didn’t follow these impulses and break through any membrane was that I wasn’t convinced I wanted to go there. I was dreaming of passing through to the other side, but at the same time I wanted to stay on the side I was already on. I was still with Anne or the memory of Anne. I knew that memories get superseded by desire, and because I was worried about losing Anne, I held on to her memory, in my mind. And I wouldn’t say that I was fighting a battle between memory and desire, because memory also was desire.
All the time I was thinking this my hand was shivering.
“It’s just a breast,” she said.
“I’m fine,” I said.
And something about my saying that brought my attention back to my hand, feeling the heat from her body, the softness of the flesh, and the structural framework of the body beneath that flesh.
But I didn’t cross to the other side. She’s there, I thought, on one side and I’m on the other side. And yes, I could have gone over and joined her except for the membrane. The thing about the sexual membrane is, once you’re on one side, the other side seems very far away.
We sat like that for what seemed like a long time, and although I was looking into her eyes and she was looking into mine, what our eyes were saying were different things. I didn’t know about my eyes, but her eyes were saying, “You almost made it. Almost, but not quite.”
4.
Feather, still looking into my eyes, raised a finger and tapped me on my chest, gently pressing her finger into my breastbone. I felt the sensation passing through my skin and through my breastbone, and I didn’t think I’d asked any question but, as if answering a question, she took my hand and led me along a path in the pine trees to a Volkswagen van parked on a dirt road in the middle of a clearing. Fletcher was already in the van, the door open, eating rice from a bowl, using chopsticks. The whole back of the van was a platform with a foam pad and sheets, and when Feather and Fletcher began taking off their clothes, I assumed that they would want to be together when whatever was going to happen started happening. Which was fine with me. And when it did start to happen—first some light touching of feet, then rubbing of feet and ankles and lower legs—I was ready to go. As I started to squeeze past Feather she took my hand and placed it on Fletcher’s foot. She grabbed his other foot herself and together we began rubbing. I imitated her massaging style, using my fingers and the knuckles of my fingers to dig as deeply as I could into the emotion-filled muscles and fascia of the ball of his foot. I could hear raindrops hitting the roof of the van when Fletcher sat up, took me by my shoulders, and positioned me so that I found myself straddling Feather, who was lying on her stomach. My hands were kneading her large gluteus muscle, and Fletcher was behind me, rubbing my back through my shirt. I still had my clothes on, unlike Feather, who turned over, so that I was now massaging her neck and her legs and everything between.
The whole interweaving dance had a mind of its own, and it continued until, at a certain point, Fletcher was massaging my back, and Feather was massaging Fletcher’s back, and the only person not massaging was me, flat on my stomach, face tilted to one side, eyes closed, feeling the skin of my neck and back and buttocks exposed to the air. I could feel my belt being unbuckled and I knew that hands were touching me but I couldn’t tell whose hands they were. And when I heard the metal doors of the van swing open I couldn’t tell who left or who came until I heard Fletcher’s voice asking me to turn over. And when I did I could see that Feather was gone. I could see that I was aroused, and I could feel it, but I was too relaxed or too lost in experience to do anything but notice.
One aspect of the sexual membrane is that once you’re on the sexual side, you don’t really care what happens next. In a sense I’d gone to a movie, and I was watching the movie, and at some point—I didn’t know when—the movie became a different movie, and by the end of the movie I was enjoying whatever movie I was watching, and had forgotten a switch had occurred.
And as Fletcher continued massaging, the distinction between sexual organ and other organs—skin, say, or brain—disappeared, and in the middle of that disappearance I experienced something. I wouldn’t call it cataclysmic, because it
was effortless and sudden, and while I and my body were experiencing all the physiological things that happened in the aftermath of that, Fletcher unrolled some toilet paper. Even wiping my stomach was a kind of massage, and it wasn’t absolutely clear if clean-shaven Fletcher, his hair tied out of his face, was being sexual. There was no sign of that. It was only clear that he was attempting to be kind, and for me, at the receiving end, there wasn’t any difference between attempting to be kind and being kind itself.
Of course when it was all over I went back to the other side of the membrane, the nonsexual side. Fletcher became no longer a pair of practiced hands dancing the dance of pleasure; now he was a stringy-haired hippie manqué, and while I still liked him, as a human being, I didn’t want to be with him. So I decided to take a walk.
There was a trail that led up from the van into the hills and I walked on that trail up the hill until I came to a wooden ladder over what might have been an electric fence. I stepped over that, walked out into a field, and in the middle of this field I came to the proverbial two roads diverging. Actually they were two trails diverging, an unused fire road and a smaller trail worn into the hillside grass.
Normally it wouldn’t have been a question. I would have just picked a trail and kept walking. But I’d been thinking about desire and the twin poles that comprised desire: want and need. There was moment-to-moment craving on the one hand, and on the other, something that led to long-term satisfaction and fulfillment. Like everyone else, I believed I wanted satisfaction and fulfillment, so I stood at this junction, looking at the two roads, one less traveled than the other, and I knew it wasn’t just the two roads, it was the meaning of the two roads. I somehow imagined that my choice would determine, not only where I went, but by virtue of that choice, what my world would be. It wasn’t that one road was Anne and one road was Feather; both roads were going in the same direction. It was merely a question of knowing what it was I needed, and based on that, where I needed to go.
When Blake said that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, he didn’t say how long the road would be, or which road it was, and so I stood, not transfixed, but not moving forward, looking at these two brown roads.
I’d read in a book one time that a way to break through a barrier is to talk to yourself, in a mirror, on LSD. I had no mirror, but I stood in this meadow, a green grassy meadow. Clouds were obscuring the moon but there was light enough to see, and there was one big tree sitting in the middle of this meadow and I went up to this tree and started talking. Not talking. I knew the tree couldn’t talk, but I tried to imagine, if it did, how would the tree communicate? I tried to talk with the tree. I stood in front of the tree, sending signals, sending vibrations, trying to receive something, or hear something, to have the tree, not tell me what to do, but show me, so that I might know. And because it was spring some seeds were falling, and one seed came down like a whirligig and landed on my head. I brushed it off. That wasn’t what I wanted. I was trying to communicate. I was trying to communicate with this tree.
Although the tree was probably sending me loads of signals or vibrations, nothing was getting through. There was a skin between the tree and me, a membrane separating us, and my strategy was to tear at the fabric of the membrane. I knew the membrane was a mental construct, and that all I had to do was step through that mental construct. I knew my decision about the two trails was not about the trails, but about how I walked on whatever trail I took.
And maybe I would have acted on this knowledge, except I was distracted by the rain that was starting to fall. Also by the thunder and the lightning strikes that were moving their way across the eastern horizon. I didn’t think about the danger of standing on a hillside in an electrical storm. I thought about the lightning, and the different kinds of thunder. Chief Joseph was named after a kind of thunder, and I thought about cracking thunder and brittle thunder and howling thunder and vibrating thunder—and also the rolling thunder that I imagined had been rolling for a very long time across the great midwestern plain to get to me. By counting the seconds between the flash and the thunder, and dividing that by some number, I might have estimated the lightning’s distance. But instead, I stood there, a light rain falling against my face, waiting for the next burst of light, and then waiting for the sound of the light. I stayed on the slope as the rain stopped and the thunder moved away. I waited to see, when the clouds parted, if I could see any sign of the waning moon.
I didn’t see any moon because the clouds never completely parted, but as I was waiting, that’s when I remembered the gas station in New Jersey. I remembered the car, the dark Mercedes turning at the last moment, but not before hitting my car, my maroon car. Anne had said, “Get something to drink,” and I was coming out of the convenience store. She’d pulled up to the door and I’d stepped off the curb. I was opening the car door, turning my body to sit down into the car, when I saw the flash of darkness, and then I felt the collision. Not a big collision, but I felt it. I got out, looked at Anne who was looking straight ahead, arms on the wheel, in shock. The other car was still moving, and as it pulled out of the gas station onto the Palisades Parkway I ran after it and watched it merging into the larger road.
When I got back to the car Anne was shaking. She was nervously talking and I didn’t notice the tears in her eyes because I was thinking about the damage and the people who caused the damage. I wanted to see what they’d done to my car. I wanted to see the dent they’d put in the side by the fender. The dark paint of the car had scraped away and replaced the old maroon color, and the wheel well was bent slightly. But that was about it. And I was reassured that that was it. I was alive at least, and Anne was alive.
5.
The next morning I went to the now-deserted house and sat on an overstuffed chair on the porch. The air was full of the sounds of animals and birds and trees swaying. Pine resin was warming in the sun. I didn’t find any coffee to make so I drank water. I drove into town and spent the morning driving around, looking for station wagons. I was fairly methodical in my walking up and down the various streets, undaunted by my lack of success. The Mercury Tracer wasn’t a popular car so not that many were made, and there weren’t that many—none maroon—on the streets of Boulder.
Sometime in the late afternoon I wandered into the pedestrian mall. On a side street off the mall I discovered, in a large community building, a poetry class in progress. I was tired so I sat in a chair in the back of the room, listening to people talking about Beatniks, and about various poets. A man, with a beard like Allen Ginsberg’s, standing beneath an uplifted basketball backboard, began talking about William Carlos Williams.
Apparently there’s a poem by William Carlos Williams in which a man stops his car, lets his kids off at school, then drives to where the road ends, and from there walks down to the edge of the river. Even in the city there still is some mud, and there still are some flowers growing in the mud, and some weeds are still down there. He knows the names of the flowers by heart, and so for him to see these flowers growing in the mud takes him outside of what he normally calls himself. There are no windows down by the river, he doesn’t look through any window, but there is a membrane there, the membrane between his ordinary world and another world. When he crouches down and touches the petal of a white flower with his fingertip, he enters that other world.
Then, like a door shutting, a sound, say a honking, wakes him, and he turns around, walks back to his car, and drives away from the river. But not away from the other world. He thinks he’s left the other world but the other world has come with him, and in fact if he would look in the passenger seat he would see it.
But he’s driving now.
Later, at night with his wife … No, before that. He’s driving his black sedan. He’s a doctor making house calls, and he’s calling on the sick and dying. Everyone around him is dying and he watches them die, and he knows that death is the end of one world and the beginning of another world and he tries to see what that other world is.
He thinks he’s standing outside of that other world.
At night, in bed with his wife, with the comforter pulled to their necks, he lies on his back and sees in his mind all the people he’s seen dying. Everyone he sees is dying. He looks at his wife and she’s dying. He actually sees her skin losing its elasticity and folding into itself like a forgotten piece of fruit.
He knows that death is part of the other world, and he doesn’t look at his own face because he knows a person can’t live like that. A person can’t live in the other world and still live in this one. You start to go crazy. He was starting to see death, or the world of death, and the world of death, which was supposed to stay on its own side, wasn’t staying on its own side. It was coming over to his side, and he couldn’t live like that.
When they tested the atomic bomb there were men who wanted to see what it looked like with the naked eye and they stood out in front of the shack and watched the explosion. But then they died, because you can’t live like that. You have to block it out. Like sunscreen, you have to put up a shield or membrane that keeps that side or that thought or that vision from disrupting what’s on this side.
So you try to block it out. But you can’t block it out. William Carlos Williams couldn’t block it out. He tried not to look at his wife but he dreamed about her. In his dream she was floating facedown on the top of the water. He wanted to wake up but he already was awake. He wanted to stop sweating so he said, “Okay. I don’t deny it. It does exist.”
“What?” his wife said, waking up. “What’s wrong, dear?”
“Nothing.”
“There is something.”
“No,” he said. “There’s nothing.”
“Then why are you looking at me like that?”
