by Jane Smiley
Still, on the cusp between a life of desires and a life without desires, Paul found he was awakening with a sense of dread more and more frequently. If not Zoe, what? If not Machu Picchu and Giza, what? Thirty more years of lotus position on the balcony of his apartment in West Hollywood waiting for transcendence to find him? That might have been the question he would have asked some of the monks up north if they had gotten there. But he had known instinctively that Zoe would have carried her cloak of visibility with her even into the monastery and the monks would have been confused. She had that effect, and it took time to wear off. Here, in fact, in this house with these people, might be the only place in the world where Zoe Cunningham left her cloak of visibility by the door. He put on his glasses. Oh, it was 3:19 a.m. He took off his glasses.
Out of the darkness, Zoe’s voice said, “Hi.”
He said, “Hi. You’re awake.”
“May I tell you my dream?”
“Of course.” He slid down in the bed and turned toward her. She cuddled comfortably against him, and though his body seemed to form itself around hers, his jaw suddenly throbbed. Was there a cause for that? She said, “I was at that restaurant with my old boyfriend Roger Rector, the one at the end of Sunset, right on the beach. It’s a seafood place with peanut shells on the floor. I can’t remember what it’s called, but we were out on the pier. I don’t think there really is a pier, but it was like the Santa Monica Pier, and I could see us talking and leaning over our food, and I could also see this huge wave, like a big curl, looming over us, maybe a hundred feet in the air. I wasn’t afraid.”
“Did it hit you?”
“No, it just loomed. I said, ‘Look, Roger,’ and he looked up from his breaded shrimp. Then it was over. It wasn’t a nightmare.”
“Roger Rector?”
“Yes, and his brothers were named Willy and Dick.”
“Do you think the parents had any idea of what they were doing when they named those boys?”
“Well, I have no idea about the mother, but Roger always said it was his father’s way of blessing them.”
Paul laughed, then he said, “I’m sorry if I woke you.”
“Did you? I don’t know, I thought my dream woke me. You know, one time when I was in my twenties, I was sleeping in my trailer over lunchtime, and I had a dream that I was in my high-school English class. We were all sitting around the table, and the teacher stood up and he said, loud and clear, ‘Okay, today I am going to tell you kids the secret of life.’ I leaned forward, and we all stopped talking, and he opened his mouth to speak, and right then, right at that exact moment, the PA knocked on my trailer door and woke me up. I mean, how did that happen? Was that just a coincidence?”
Paul rubbed his jaw because it throbbed again, and Zoe glanced at him, but she didn’t ask anything. He said, “My immediate response is that there is no secret of life, and so, whenever you think you are going to be given the secret of life just like that, you will back away from it.”
She looked at him, then smiled. She said, “I think of you as knowing the secret of life.”
“Do you? I think I know a few techniques with which I make adjustments and pass the time.”
“But you seem enlightened.”
“I seem patient. I am patient.”
“Maybe that’s the same thing.”
“I don’t know. Maybe it is.”
She inclined her head toward him and pressed against him. She said, “At any rate, it’s a rare quality, especially around here.”
His jaw throbbed a third time. That was the third time, he thought, in maybe a minute, but even so, as her affection radiated from her body into his, he felt himself relax. And so he slipped downward in the bed, under the covers, and rolled right up against her. It was comfortable. He thought, Was he immune to this, too, to such simple comfort?
Once, he had read an article about the physiology of sleep that said that there was a distinct shift, almost like a switch. You drifted down and drifted down, more and more relaxed but still in a state of being awake, and then your brain performed some function and you were asleep. After reading that article, he had tried to attend to those seconds and moments, until, eventually, he had learned to note the switch, just as he had learned to note the feeling of his brain thinking, of energy, in particular, passing from one side of his brain to the other, through the corpus callosum.
Her affection did comfort him, no doubt a hormonal thing, oxytocin, probably. Nice word, “oxytocin,” he thought, as his brain got closer and closer to flipping that switch that he did not know the name of. He felt her take a deep breath and let it out.
He was standing with someone on a narrow parapet. He knew the guy’s name but couldn’t remember it. He looked like one of the stockers at Whole Foods. He was wearing a uniform, but it wasn’t a Whole Foods uniform, it was a military uniform of some kind. He knew that he had to look over the parapet, because the guy kept saying, “Look over the parapet,” but he could hardly get his eyes open enough to do so. The guy said, “Look at them. They’re getting out.”
He asked who was getting out.
“The prisoners!” Finally, he was able to look over the parapet. The yard in front of him was in black and white. It looked like a prison yard in a movie. It was empty. The guy said, “They must have forgotten.” Paul remembered that his name was Bit, though part of him, even in the dream, knew that wasn’t a name.
“Who?”
“The guards forgot to leave the doors open. They have to be reminded every day.”
“To do what?” He was not only sleepy, he thought, he was stupid.
“To leave the doors open! To leave the doors open!”
“Why do they want to leave the doors open? This is a prison.”
“Of course it is, but the prisoners have to escape! Didn’t you know that?”
Now the prison began to look a bit like the monastery. A beautiful green hillside fell away from the wall, and the sun was shining. Paul, in his dream, felt himself breathe deeply and have a sudden sense of joy. They were going to let the prisoners escape! Things were better than he had thought they would be!
“They have to escape so we can shoot them! We can’t afford to try them! We can’t afford to feed them! Where is your weapon? Have you lost your weapon? Here they come!”
Bit lifted his weapon and rested the barrel on the parapet. A few people came out into the yard. Paul in his dream didn’t recognize them. They looked around and smiled. They thought they were escaping. Bit shot them, one, two, three, four. Then another one came out. It was a man who turned into a dog as soon as it saw the corpses. Bit shot it anyway. He said, “Where’s your weapon? We have to shoot them all! They are escaping! They are guilty! It’s the best we can do for them. I am cruel only to be kind! Shoot them!”
In the dream, he was stupid, but he did recognize the logic. He also realized he would shoot them. But he cried out and woke himself up. He heard himself say, “We shot them on the film.”
“What?” said Zoe.
Paul took a deep breath and twisted his head one way on the pillow and then the other way.
“Were you dreaming of making a movie? You distinctly said, ‘We shot the film.’”
“Did I? I thought I said, ‘We shot them on the film.’”
“That’s not what it sounded like.”
“I dreamt I was on a parapet outside a prison in some country like Bosnia or Poland, and I was told that the prisoners were starving, so the prison doors were being left open for them to escape, except that as they escaped we were supposed to shoot them. I dreamt that I thought this was a good idea.”
“Don’t you remember? Stoney was telling that story after dinner, about one of those guys who want Max to make that movie. He said his grandfather did that with German prisoners in Russian prisons in World War II.”
“I don’t remember hearing that.” He took a deep breath and then another, hoping to accelerate the breakdown of adrenaline in his system that his dream had c
aused. He closed his eyes. He often thought that if he could really manage his own adrenaline, he could then more perfectly manage his own thoughts.
“Well, you must have. How odd. What a nightmare.”
“It was a nightmare.”
“Are you okay?”
“I haven’t had a nightmare in a long time. I usually don’t dream.” He stretched and shifted his position against Zoe. He said, “I’m sure this is my nightmare of the Iraq war, my fear that I’ll accept its logic, maybe. Or that I already do without knowing it.”
“You got an erection.”
“What?”
“You got an erection about five minutes ago. I was tickling your testicles and you got an erection, but then it went away before you woke up.”
“Why were you tickling my testicles?”
“Because they were there. Because I was awake. Because I had been tickling the insides of your thighs and before that I was stroking your chakras. I thought it might feel good.”
Paul turned this over in his mind.
“Do you not want me to tickle you when you’re asleep? I was just trying to—”
“Actually,” he said, “I think it’s good. I think there must have been some blocks in maybe the throat and the base chakra, and your tickling activated those blocks, and I had that dream. You know, for years I could only fall asleep if I was lying on my back with my left hand touching my throat chakra and my right hand touching my base chakra. When I started studying, one of my teachers said that those were my most blocked chakras, and I had to use my hands to open them up and connect them to everything else.” He took hold of his head and turned it once to the left and once to the right. He could sense his second and third vertebrae release.
Now he began to feel better. That’s what words were for, he had found. Their only virtue, but it was an essential one, was to enter the flow of adrenaline and fragment it by means of interference. The quanta of words tumbled through the energy of feelings and blocked their flow like rocks in a stream, and pretty soon the feelings lost their dynamic and their power. You, whoever you were, were not within the feelings anymore, but beside them or above them, observing them. That was the perennial efficacy of mere words. It was a lovely thing. He said, “No, I like you to tickle me when I’m sleeping. If it arouses a nightmare, so what? I don’t mind a nightmare.”
“You seem more enlightened than that.”
“Oh dear,” said Paul. “I don’t think enlightenment is about being happy.”
“What is it about, then?”
“Well, you know…” He could feel himself go into parable mode. “I think about all the archeological sites I’ve visited. When I go, try as I might to make it otherwise, I just see ruins. But there are others who know more than I do who see what was once there. Right now, that’s what I think enlightenment is. It’s a sense of all the things that exist having meaning. People’s brains are organized to build and perceive patterns, and so the greatest enlightenment is the largest possible construction of meaning, a construction in which every nail and joint and angle and accident would have the same amount of meaning as every supporting beam and facing board and brace and intention. All the masters say that my construction will eventually be blown up by real enlightenment, and, sure, it will. It has to be. It’s like the Tower of Babel. They worked hard on it and built it higher and higher and with greater and greater complexity, and then—boom—God blew it up. Whoops, said the folks on the ground, God is angry. He didn’t like our tower. But that’s just their perception. It’s just as likely that what really happened is that it poufed out or vanished into another dimension, that God saw it was good and it ceased to have material existence. Its disappearance wasn’t actually a judgment, but, rather, the explosion was a measure of the difference between God and man. I am operating on the premise that I’m as ignorant at any given moment as I can’t help being, but that when I am less ignorant things will have more meaning, until they, and I, cease to be human at all.”
She said, “Hmm,” as if she had not quite followed this explanation and was now thinking about something else, but Paul rather liked that Tower of Babel idea. He wondered whether he would remember it. “You know,” she said, “I should tell you that Simon and I had a little thing today.”
He pictured them arguing about something, but what? The punch? (His jawed throbbed.) But Simon seemed genuinely remorseful about that, so, unless there was some irritable, grudge-holding side of Zoe that he didn’t know about, he didn’t think that was likely. Simon was impulsive but not argumentative or defensive, as far as he could tell. The constant joking seemed truly good-natured. He said, “What about?”
“Well, about the usual.”
“You and Simon have a usual source of disagreement already? You’ve only known each other a few days. Did you get on him about punching me? My feelings about that are—”
“Honey, it wasn’t an argument. We fucked. While you were doing yoga and then having that phone session with the girl from Atlanta.”
Paul had to admit he was startled, or maybe more than startled, but then it struck him all over again that that was what technique was for. If you are technically adept, then you always know the right thing to say even when you are startled, and so he said, “Does that seem to you to have been appropriate?”
“I don’t know. It was fun. He’s nice. I realize he punched you, but I’d sort of forgotten about that by the late afternoon.”
Nevertheless, his jaw gave another throb.
“He’s had lots of experience, as you can imagine, given the way he looks.”
Paul cleared his throat in an effort to attain a state of disinterestedness. “Older women?”
“Among others.”
“Older men?”
“I gathered that, yes, a few of those.”
“Did you use a condom?”
“We didn’t have one. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. It seemed harmless.” Her voice was still light, but not quite as light as it had been when she first told him. He said, “I guess, as your counselor, I have to point out that I believe your instincts have led you astray on this one.”
“Well, as my counselor, you shouldn’t be sleeping with me in the first place, isn’t that true?”
He sat up and turned toward her. She looked a tad defiant, which he had to admit was a tad intimidating. He reached around her and turned on the light, reviewing as best he could the agreed-upon unspoken ground rules of their relationship. They seemed to be that she had the right to tell him about things and he had the right to suggest productive and non-self-destructive modes of behavior, and at the same time, he had the right to pursue a sexual relationship with her while she had the right to become attached to him, and additionally that she had the right to spend her money freely on the two of them and he had the right to pursue his various disciplines in the course of the day. He had the right to be honest with her about his opinions, sometimes brutally so, and she had the right to express her feelings, even when they were contradictory and, let’s say, unattractive. He took a deep breath. He said, “Yes, some people would say that, but having a relationship seemed to be something we both wanted, and so I didn’t feel that there was a mismatch of power that would make either of us unduly vulnerable to the other if I became your counselor.”
“Well, I don’t think power comes into what I did with Simon at all. We felt like doing it, it seemed like it was going to be fun, and it was. Better than getting it on with Charlie, who’s been hitting on me in his way, too.”
“But he’s slept with men.”
“Well, I didn’t find out about that until afterward, but he said that he’s always been the pitcher, not the catcher.”
“Did you douche?”
“Well, I cleaned myself up, of course, but why are you focusing on this part? There are so many parts to focus on, and you’ve decided that HIV is the important one.”
“What do you think is the important one?”
“That he’s twenty. Th
at he’s my former husband’s girlfriend’s son. That he’s younger than my own daughter, who is in the house. Then, of course, there’s the part about him punching you. If this were a movie and you were the villain, then it would be good that I fell for him after that, but if you were the hero, then it would show the true evil of my promiscuous nature.”
“How about your continuing discomfort with the sessions I have with women like Marcelle and Anita and Jolene and Diana? That seems to have been part of your motivation today.”
She ignored this and said, “But I guess I feel like the punch doesn’t really have meaning, apart from what he said about it.”
“So you’re focusing on the incestuous part.”
“Do you really think it’s incestuous? I never met him before. We’re not related.”
She had moved away from him, and now there was about a foot between them, probably a good idea. He said, “I guess I think that there are two ways of looking at that piece of it. Does it feel incestuous?”
