Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  Hollis gripped himself again, firmly this time, like he was opening up an F-18 over the desert. His circumference swelled and throbbed against the added pressure of his palm and he felt a surge in his chest, like he had vitality to spare. More than enough for Susan, he thought, if she would only take it from him. If she would only relax enough to allow it to happen. He could show her the way back. He could show her the optimism she had lost to her belief in inevitability. He could reunite her with the inner glow and the humor and the spontaneity and the lust for existence. It was possible, he thought, barrel-rolling the F-18 down along the desert floor. Because inevitability was a cheap parlor trick. Because one was only as one believed.

  She would have to let him in. She would have to trust him enough to lead her. She would need to lay down her arms. She would need to stop lashing at him and criticizing him for following his own rhythm; a rhythm she had once loved and that had slowly grown alien to her. The nay-saying and the finding of fault and the resurrection of old grievances would have to stop. He could lead. He would lead. He was her husband and he would lead. But she had to be willing to follow. He would open himself to her. He would present himself without defenses. He would admit fault wherever appropriate and he would give all credit due and then some. He would soften all the ground between them. But Susan would have to be willing to follow.

  He opened his eyes.

  Hollis was now wide-awake and fully engorged, flush with the prospect of a new beginning – of a continuation of an old beginning. The answer was suddenly staring him in the face too simple, elegant and timeless to be wrong. With a snap of his wrist, he billowed up the sheets like a mainsail catching the wind and rolled in towards his wife. He scooted in so that his chest curved over the bowing of her back and his knees tucked in behind her own. She, too, must have been awake and thinking. Her muscles contracted instantly, hardening her body to his as if to a cold wind or a touch of ice.

  He had expected this reaction. After all, it had been a very long time and it was a reasonable response under the circumstances. He would not hold this autonomic aversion reaction against her. He would hold nothing against her but his own body and his desire to reintroduce her to what she had forgotten about him and about herself. He would hold against her nothing more nor less than the joy of life itself. Starting now. It would take courage to make the first move, to break the ice, and if she could not take the first step, then he would do it. He would risk the rejection. He would instigate and she would have to deal with it. Whatever came, he would endure it for the sake of the bigger picture.

  And in the end, she would thank him. In the end she would be Susan Kimbell once again, free and happy and full of it. Full of it again. And she would welcome him back. In the end, she would greet him as a hero and a liberator.

  He found the hem of her nightgown with his fingers and very slowly pulled it up her body. With a mind its own, the tip of him found the flesh of her bottom, poking it with unintended deliberation, like a child might poke a balloon with a stick. He deftly adjusted himself so the full length of his shaft laid snuggly along the crease where one of her thighs lay upon the other. There it felt heavy and thick and potent. He was vital, by God. Vital! Retired my ass, he thought. I’m just getting started.

  He tightened the muscles is his groin. His penis angled inward in a sharp, pulsing thrust against her, slipping slightly further into the crease. He placed a hand on the top of her leg and squeezed again. Another pulse, and this time …

  “Honestly, Hollis.” Susan threw back the sheet, sat up and walked into the bathroom, closing the door.

  In a minute, the shower started. Hollis lay in bed, dick in his hand, listening.

  It was an understandable reaction, he told himself. Really. Anything else would have been a surprise. This would take some time. It would take some patience. But she would respond. She would respond to him.

  The erection left him as she had, unceremoniously and much quicker than he had expected. Hollis climbed out of bed, grabbed his bathrobe and padded out of the bedroom and downstairs to his study.

  Except for the ever more faint running of the shower, the house was quiet. He grabbed his meditation mat from its tube behind the door, turned and headed back upstairs for his place behind the sofa looking out onto the back yard. He disrobed. He unrolled the mat. He sat. He skipped the warm-up. He was plenty warmed up already. He contorted himself straight into the full lotus, pulling at his ankles like he was trying to fold a dead body into a trunk.

  He closed his eyes. He meditated. He tried to meditate. He visualized the light that outshines all light. He visualized the walls melting away. He told himself again and again and again that he was at peace, at peace, at peace.

  But he was not at peace. He opened his eyes.

  There was too much in the way of the Singularity this morning. He looked out onto the backyard, shadowless and wet with rain. A wind was blowing small yellow leaves across the grass. For the first time in the unseasonably warm autumn, it was easy for him to imagine that winter was not but a few weeks off. Two robins hopped about jabbing their beaks intermittently into the ground, every so often cocking their heads at him, the Buddha in the living room window.

  It would have been beneath him to be angry. A sign that he was out of control. So he was not angry. He was frustrated, true. Physically frustrated. But anger was not a part of his emotional lexicon and so he was not angry. Nor was he hurt. Regardless of what her motivations might have been – to embarrass, to belittle, to humiliate – Susan’s rejection of him was not an emotional event for him. It was all unfolding as he had expected. She was reacting out of fear, that was all. Susan was fine. All in good time.

  He closed his eyes.

  He refocused, flooding his mind with bright light – melting walls, melting walls – feeling the vibration, the humming, from deep within the iron core of the earth, not so much feeling it – for we all feel it, the vibration of creation that buzzes through our bones every second of our lives – as connecting with it, allowing it to be the organizing force that governs our existence at a molecular level. The key, said the scholars on the shelves in his study, was to stop resisting this singular vibrational truth. As the Earth is in harmony with the cosmos, so we must tune ourselves to the Earth. The key was resonation. Not resignation; resonation. Harmonic convergence with the Universe; with the truth. All pain came from resistance; from fighting the vibration that was truth.

  The vibration started in his buttocks, which were pressed against the straw reeds of his genuine, $49.99 India Straw Meditation MasterMat. Although always contemporaneous with the refrigerator cycling on, Hollis knew that the ultra-low, barely perceptible buzz slowly circling his perineum and alighting hesitantly upon his coccyx, was not the refrigerator. It was the beginning of resonance – Resonance – that introduced genuine meditative consciousness.

  The vibration, as it always did, radiated outwards from the coccyx, up along the spine, outwards in symmetrical fashion along the left and right femur toward the knee joints, and, also, down along the base of his scrotum.

  And thus came the inherent conflict for Hollis with vibrational meditation.

  This last dipping, scooping, cupping flange of the vibration introduced, rather than a genuine meditative consciousness, thoughts with a much higher potential for anti-transcendental distraction. In particular, this morning, the vibrations through his nether-regions induced thoughts of Bethany Koan standing naked, backlit by moonlight pouring into the windows of the Westin Hotel. The walls around him did not melt away, but, instead, were replaced by the walls of Room 713. Bethany’s face was serene and welcoming; her arms were open, extended in the bleached-blue light as though she were reaching for him beneath the surface of moonlit water.

  Had he kissed her?

  He had kissed her. By God he had kissed her.

  She had kissed him, anyway, long and deep and full on the lips and he had not pulled away. So he had kissed her. With her arms around him. She had pre
ssed her beautiful nubile body, every naked inch of the body that had turned so many heads that night, she had pressed it against his own body, standing on her toes so that she could touch her mouth to his, so that she could slip the very tip of her tongue delicately along the inside of his upper lip, and he had not pulled away. And when she had pulled back the covers on the bed and slipped beneath them, pulling his face down towards hers by the necktie, Hollis Johns – son of Homer and MaryAnn, father of David, Tilly and Ben, husband of Susan, friend of Akahito Takada – had leaned in and kissed Bethany Koan on the cheek, pulled the covers over her exquisite golden breasts, brushed her forehead gently with the backs of his fingers and, with a casual “goodnight” belied by everything that had just transpired, walked out of the room.

  He did not remember driving home. Not a single turn or stoplight. Ordinarily this might have suggested something about the quantity of alcohol he had consumed over the course of the evening and its two, vaguely connected parties. Someone might rightly suggest that he should not have been driving at all. A lecture from Susan on that subject was still not out of the question.

  But if alcohol was a contributing factor in depriving him of a memory of the drive home, it was not the main culprit. He had not really been present for the drive home. He had left his mind and all of its life-recording, memory-making capacity, back in Room 713, where it replayed a ninety-second loop of his existence that was as endless as it was brief. It began with the sight of Bethany on the far side of bed, dress slipping past her waist. It ended with his hand on her forehead. Then it started over again.

  Now, as he sat naked behind his couch, universal vibrations thrumming out along his genitals, Hollis reconnected with the emotion that, until now, had been lost. It all came flooding back, not as a ninety-second cinematic loop, but as a sensorial wave – the smell of her hair and her skin, the taste of her mouth, the pressure of the contours of her body fitting snuggly into the contours of his own body, the feeling of warm flesh through cotton, the strain of her muscles as she raised herself to him, up, up, arching those perfect feet to bring her mouth to his, the toned thigh sliding inevitably between his legs as she steadied herself against him, the smell of her breath and the sound of it leaving her body and rushing back in like the breathing of the ocean.

  For meditative purposes, the moment was not a total loss. There is something mildly transcendental in the erotic daydream. Not enough for one to commune with the elusive Singularity, but certainly sufficient to loose the moorings and drift a bit from the here and now. If Hollis had some vague appreciation for the state of his arousal, he was altogether unaware of the slowly rhythmic, manual assistance that he was providing.

  “Hollis…what on earth…”

  He opened his eyes.

  Susan stood looking over the back of the couch in her pink, terrycloth robe, her mouth agape. “What… are… you… What are you doing?”

  Hollis dropped his penis to the carpet, unfolding himself, reaching back for his robe and his unflappable-even-if-a-little-perturbed-at-your-lack-of-worldliness demeanor.

  “I’m meditating,” he said calmly, ramming his arms through the sleeves.

  “Meditating?! That looks a whole lot like masturbating to me, Hollis. And in front of the living room windows? What has gotten into you? I don’t even...”

  “Relax, Susan. Relax. It’s our yard. No one is out there but the birds. Just…”

  “You know the mowers will be here today.”

  “Not until ten. If they come at all. It’s been raining all morning.”

  “Hollis? What time the mowers arrive is hardly the point.”

  “I didn’t bring up the mowers. Seems to me that you brought up the mowers. So what, exactly, is the point?”

  “The point is … is… what you think you are doing sitting naked behind the couch jerking off in front of the windows?”

  “Oh, Christ.”

  Hollis stood up and fastened his robe with a sharp two-handed yank on the belt. He was still rather dramatically at attention and the robe tented ridiculously outwards over the back of the couch, towards his wife. He tugged at the fabric in irritation, perhaps not realizing that the sideways big-top look was, under the circumstances, far less awkward and dramatic than the sudden Jack-in-the Box, little angry man leaping from behind a curtain, moment.

  J’accuse! It seemed to declare wildly, swaying and bobbing like a drunken sailor.

  Hollis pretended not to notice, doing his best to hold his wife’s eyes to his own by ratcheting up the emotion in his face. It might have worked, except that it was hard not to notice that now he and the little drunken sailor were both angry and accusing.

  “That’s just plain ignorant, Susan. You have no idea what you’re talking about. I wasn’t jerking off, as you put it. Don’t pretend to know what you don’t understand. This is a daily, mind-expanding exercise for me. It’s very relaxing. It improves peace of mind. It improves focus. I don’t expect you to understand. It is a meditative process. It takes forty-five minutes to an hour. I try to do this very early in the mornings while you and Ben are still asleep to spare you, and me, precisely this scene.”

  “Every morning?” She asked, incredulously.

  “Every morning. Forty-five minutes to an hour. And spare me the attitude. When you have studied meditation like I have studied meditation, we can talk. Until then…”

  “If I studied meditation like you’ve, apparently, studied meditation, Hollis, I’d go through two cases of batteries in a week. Have you completely lost your mind?”

  Hollis was through talking. He bent to the floor, rolled up his meditation mat, stepped out from behind the sofa and charged past her across the living room, the angry sailor warning everything in his path to stand back and let him be. Susan took heed and stepped out of his way, saying nothing.

  A long shower helped Hollis in a lot of ways. By the time he had dried and shaved and dressed he had regained his composure and his equanimity. So Susan did not understand vibrational meditation? Big deal. Most people didn’t. And if one did not understand the meditative process, one had no context, no frame of reference, for understanding one’s naked husband behind the couch in a full lotus. He knew that an erection was a natural result of increased circulation that came from a successful meditation, but how was she to know that? She wouldn’t know and, really, it was unreasonable to expect her to know. So he needed to let all of that go.

  There, he thought as he cinched his belt. Done. Released. No longer an issue.

  And the same with her reaction in bed. How was she supposed to react to his sudden, unannounced affection, particularly if she had been harboring the belief that he had been adulterously engaged the previous night? Again…she had only reacted consistent with her level of understanding. There. Done. Released.

  He went downstairs into the kitchen, following the smell of eggs and bacon and coffee and the sound of CNN barking out its half-hourly round-up of the news.

  ...minutes after the hour with these headlines. At least forty-three people died and seventy-six were injured in three car bombings in the center of the Iraqi capital…

  “There you are. Would you like some breakfast?” Susan had a tight, artificial solicitude in her voice. She, too, had obviously decided to let it go – whatever she had concluded it had been.

  “I’d love some, my dear,” he responded with a muscular cheeriness. He set the table and poured them each a cup of coffee.

  “How’s Ben?”

  “Still sacked out. He was up late last night. After his little dance with Mae, he was too wound up to go to sleep. He came out and loved on Rhonda awhile before she left, and that was after eleven. He’s always connected with Rhonda, have you noticed that? I think it’s because she so lonely. I think he picks up on that. Rhonda loves it.”

  “Unlike Mae,” said Hollis.

  Susan gave a small laugh and shook her head as she turned off the burners and pushed the eggs around the pan. “Unlike Mae. More than she bargaine
d for. Poor David.”

  “Oh, David’s fine. Don’t worry about David.”

  “Anyway, then Rhonda left and by the time Gayle and I finished with the dishes and she left, it had to be after one or one-thirty and Ben was still up watching television.”

  Susan divided up the strips of bacon and the eggs onto plates and set them down on the kitchen table where Hollis waited. She went back to collect four pieces of toast from the toaster, and then some butter and blackberry jam from the refrigerator.

  “Thanks for the coffee,” she said as she sat down.

  …ited States civil liberties groups have launched a lawsuit to force the release of eighty-seven pictures and four videos showing abuse at Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad.

  “Can we turn that off?”

  “I’m listening to the news.”

  “It’s yelling.”

  “It’s not yelling, Hollis, it’s the news. It’s CNN.”

  “I’m not a T.V. watcher.”

  “Yes, I know you’re not. I am. I like to know what’s going on in the world.”

  “There’s always the newspaper. That’s got some news.”

  … argues the photos should stay confidential and out of public view to avoid …

  Susan turned her head to see the small screen on the counter behind her, then returned to buttering her toast.

  “Know what I was thinking this morning?” He asked, cutting into the bacon.

  Susan waited a beat too long before answering. “I really have no idea what you were thinking this morning, Hollis.”

  “I was thinking about the time when you were still in school and we took that road trip to see Buffalo Springfield.”

  … Iraq could exceed $700 billion. In current dollars, Vietnam cost U.S. taxpayers $600 billion...

  “Remember, my Valiant was in the shop so we borrowed… oh, what was his name… Kaye! Bobby Kaye! Bobby?”