“Vraiment, the flowers lovingly husband the welfare of their humans…”
“At the price of their human spirits, a pact known to be a devilish bargain since our ancestors climbed down from their trees!”
“Devilish bargain?” scoffed Guy. “Have we not seen flowers who offer molecules of enlightenment to dying humans in their hour of need? How much more proof of the Bloomenveldt’s love for our species can you require?”
“Merde!” I exclaimed, having long since had enough of this futile dialectic. “Will you not return to the coast with me now?” I said, knowing full well the answer, for all too clearly his vaporous whim was set in iron.
“Will you now refuse to go forward with me into the glorious promise of the Bloomenveldt’s heart?”
We stood there alone in the Enchanted Forest, each attempting to stare the other down at this fateful karmic nexus.
“If I insist on turning back, will you go on alone?” I at length demanded in a fury.
“If I insist on going forward, will you return alone?” Guy rejoined in a smug tone of tranquil sweetness.
“Will you not at least don your mask?” I pleaded despairingly.
“Will you not now doff yours so that as comrades, lovers, and true Children of Fortune, we may breathe the perfumes of paradise as a single perfect spirit?”
“Hijo de caga, nom de merde!” I snarled, admitting with as perfect a vacuum of good grace as I could muster that he had won.
For while Guy may have been bluffing, while he might in the end have followed me had I turned my back and strode eastward boldly, I knew full well that I could not fail to follow him if he turned his back on me. For not only did my cowardly aspect dread the thought of lone travel on the Bloomenveldt, but my more heroic nature could not abandon a comrade spirit in the jungle whether or not that spirit would have been ready to abandon me to follow his star, and no matter how much ire I now felt against him.
And to turn the screw of my frustrated fury a notch tighter, I knew full well that Guy had been able to win this contest of wills precisely because he knew this too.
And so I found myself following Guy ever deeper into the Bloomenveldt, or rather being dragged along like a small girl leashed to a large hound hot upon a scent.
For the rest of the day, Guy bounded along in great leaps to the west, pausing only to take his high hanging jumps from time to time to sniff at the air, like just such a hound following a pheromonic trail through a realm of perception wherein the bold relief of the olfactory topography belied the apparently featureless plain of the eye’s vision.
By the time we stopped for the night, I was in a foul and sullen humor indeed and hardly in any mood for discourse with the likes of him, mystic or otherwise.
But Guy Vlad Boca read nothing of this in either my mein or my silence. Vraiment, he hardly gave over his blissful babblement even while eating and drinking, he noticed not the perfect one-sidedness of the conversation, indeed I could not be entirely sure that he even noticed my existence, so toxicated was he with the glories of the perfumed visions with which his brain was so thoroughly besotted.
“…I know it is there now, for I can taste it calling to me on the wind, faint but surging with power, as one may sense the life-giving waters of a mighty river flowing unseen and unheard not so far away in the forest, the great river of the Bloomenveldt spirit flowing around me and through me, carrying me away in the loving embrace of its clear blue waters…”
Und so endless weiter. Indeed by the time we had finished our meal and I could look forward to the nighttime surcease of consciousness, it was hard to be sure who or what spoke, for Guy by now was not even looking at me as he declaimed, rather did his eyes abruptly shift randomly from focus to focus like those of a nervous rodent, or worse, like the eyes of a man in the throes of some arcane possession. So too did his voice take on a deep and almost syrupy timbre which I had never heard before, and the pronoun of the first person had vanished from the repertoire of his Lingo.
“…home to the spirit’s safe harbor in the ancestral forest, back to the long-lost garden, forward into the perfume of perfect bliss, when you were Bloomenkinder of the Earth in the innocent spirit’s grace, the great wheel turns, and the rain returns to the sea, and the many return to the one from whence they came and that moment is forever…”
There I lay in the darkness longing for sleep while Guy, or whatever dybbuk of the wood spoke through him, assailed me and the night with these visions in a hypnogogic voice which at length had me finding myself hearkening to them, hearing in them the whispered blandishments of some long lost lover.
Vraiment, I found myself erotically aroused, as if about to be enthralled by some incubus.
Alors, when I became aware of this state, my present distaste for the person of Guy Vlad Boca was overcome by both endocrine imperative and the need to do whatever had to be done to still that insinuating voice.
Which is to say, I thumbed on my ring of Touch and forthrightly applied it to the handle of the natural man.
But the same would not rise to the occasion, my own best efforts and the puissant craft of Leonardo to the contrary! For all my efforts, I might have been massaging a carrot. Indeed such a tuber would in fact have been an improvement when it came to firmness of form.
But when at limply endless length I had succeeded in falling into a frustrated, fearful, and petulant sleep, I was rudely awoken by Guy, who had already set to work with a virile vigor and not so much as a by-your-leave.
Never had Guy Vlad Boca been such a puissant lover, never had he taken unto himself such a machismo of command, for he persisted silently and remorselessly against my outrage, which was soon somewhat diminished in conviction by my hours of sexual constriction and the entirely uncharacteristic tantric mastery of his assault.
Vraiment it was an overweening assumption of the most primitive masculine prerogative, but under the circumstances, it became rather difficult to maintain the proper feminine outrage in the face of an endless succession of mighty ecstatic cusps, each one a greater relief than the last, each one propelling me further down the merciful black velvet path of sweet oblivion, until I expired into the arms of sleep and my demon Bloomenveldt lover.
The morning after, naturellement, it was quite another matter. “What got into you last night, Guy Vlad Boca?” I shouted at him upon awakening and disentangling myself from his embrace with a vigor that entirely disregarded the sanctity of his slumber. “How dare you force yourself upon me against all my protests to the contrary!”
Guy, upon awakening to this loud indignation, favored me with a smile of radiant innocence.
“Alors,” I said angrily, but not without a certain ambiguous embarrassment, “now you will grin at me like a simian and tell me how much I enjoyed it!”
“Enjoyed what?” Guy said, regarding me with the same shining visage of innocent ignorance.
Could it be that this ignorance of all unchivalrous behavior was not feigned? Vraiment, did Guy Vlad Boca have this perfect power to artlessly dissemble under even the best of circumstances?
“It’s really true, Guy?” I said, studying him closely for any sign of irony. “You remember nothing?”
Guy slowly rose to a sitting position. Still smiling the same bodhi smile, he turned his face from me to look westward across the endless ethereal Bloomenveldt, pastelled to ghostly luminescence as the rising sun only began to burn away the morning mist.
“I remember what the Bloomenkinder know,” he said in that same strange basso profundo as he clumsily scrabbled to his feet, still gazing fixedly to the west like a Bloomenkind at sunset.
Entirely distractedly, he began cramming his effects into his pack, not for a moment giving up his visionary fixation.
In a panic, I stuffed my own pack as best I was able, for Guy was already hoisting his in less time than it takes to tell, and poising for a great leap westward.
Then off he went without so much as another word, and I was reduced to catch
ing up as best I could, bounding along in Guy’s train once more as he sniffed and snuffled across the Bloomenveldt. Vraiment, and in the canine manner, he seemed to grow ever more excited as he bayed along the trails of scent.
By midafternoon, he began to veer off to the southwest in a jerky series of tacks. And then, two or three hours later, his behavior grew even more frenetic, like that of a hound brought the first full whiff of the scent of his quarry on a change in the wind.
He came down from one of his leaps with a rigid, narrow-eyed alertness, and stood quite frozen like that on a leaf, as if to await my arrival. But as it turned out, a sudden return of his lost gallantry had nothing to do with it, for when I arrived at his side he entirely ignored my presence and continued to stare fixedly along the vector of his own nose. No doubt had he been equipped with a tail, it would have pointed out straight behind him.
“What is it, Guy?” I demanded. “I see naught but the usual endless leaves and flowers.” For indeed that was all there was to be seen, not even a Bloomenkinder garden was in evidence.
“A grand and mighty spirit summoning its true children home,” said that dybbuk voice through Guy Vlad Boca’s lips. “The spirit of once and future flowers.”
“Quelle chose, Guy, before you succumb to such a puissant tropism as you describe, put your mask on at—”
But without another word, he was off in a great leap directly along the point of his fixed vision, and I was constrained to follow at once or risk losing sight of him entirely.
Nor did I have much space for thought for the next hour, for all my efforts were of necessity dedicated to negotiating leaps of sufficient force and rapidity to keep Guy in sight as he bounded across the Bloomenveldt at the greatest speed of which his efforts were capable. Nor did he seem to have any further doubts as to the precise vector of his destiny, for his course now had the geometric inevitability of a ballistic trajectory.
And then, at the apogee of one of my own leaps, I thought I spied an anomaly on the horizon exactly on the compass point toward which Guy was heading, no more than the first hint of land that one perceives after a voyage on an open ocean.
I made my next leap shorter and higher, trying to gain as lofty a vantage as possible without being left behind. Vraiment, there was something there, just on the line of the horizon, a splash of colors and shapes.
But I had no time to pause for thought when I alighted from this crow’s nest in the air, for Guy was pulling away from me already, and I had had to maximize my speed to catch up to him, indeed to merely keep him in sight. So I paused not for another clear view of whatever it was we were approaching by leaps and bounds until after quite a chase across the treetops, and indeed I only managed to catch up with him at all when he was brought up short by a sight that transfixed us both.
We stood together on a tall hillock of foliage looking out over a long shallow dip in the Bloomenveldt. The center of this plain in the treetops rose gently into another highland formed by the elevated crown of a single great tree.
In an overwhelming display of floral exuberance, the entire great tree crown had burst into flower, like a proud peacock displaying his full brilliant glory among the quotidian arboreal fowl.
“Behold, oh ye true children of the Enchanted Forest,” said a voice that in that moment seemed to speak for both my by-now-long-lost lover and that which had claimed him. “Behold the Perfumed Garden.”
19
We both stood there for a long silent moment, beholding the celestial city on the hill, for the dense profusion of great flowers seemed to grow in organized groves, color by color, form by form, so that the huge garden seemed for all the world to be divided up into arrondissements, like a true city of men.
Indeed, I was put in mind of my first sight of Great Edoku seen from space, for while the Perfumed Garden was bathed all over by the same bright afternoon sunlight, the districts thereof were a mosaic of brilliantly contrasting facets of color, so that the whole took on the aspect of an impossible gem shimmering in all the hues of the rainbow, a vision of breathtakingly chaotic color, in which, nevertheless, an elusive order seemed to be implied, just below the level of conscious apprehension.
As for Bloomenkinder, while these could hardly have been individually visible from this far vantage, their presence seemed to reveal itself in a seething motion overlaid on the vision, a wavering of the whole image like that of an overcomplicated mandala one has stared at in a toxicated state for too long.
So too could I hear the collective human mantra of the unseen and yet seen denizens thereof, for the air hummed with a faint celestial vibration, an ethereal wordless song emanating from unknown hundreds of distant human voices all harmonizing on the same single note, a note which sent my spirit soaring, a siren Om of paradise, which had my feet inching forward, and my hands beginning to move toward my mask.
Guy stood there beside me with his head bent back, and his nose in the air, and a beatific smile beaming from his face, and his eyes squeezed shut to better savor the perfumes, like a small boy inhaling the aroma of the most wonderful bakery.
Alors, if my spirit had all but been captured from afar by sight and sound alone, what must he be feeling now?
“Guy…? Guy…? Talk to me, Guy, tell me what it is that you smell on the wind!”
His eyelids peeled open, and he half-turned his head to face me. But his eyes seemed as clear and vacant as those of a Bloomenkind, and his nostrils continued to flare around long, deep draughts of perfumed air.
“The Perfumed Garden…” said that eerie dybbuk voice. “My Perfumed Garden,” said Guy Vlad Boca, albeit in a voice that seemed to speak as an echo, as a memory he had already let go, dopplering away to extinction down the corridors of time. Logic should have filled me with terror, but Guy had taken my hand in his, and his voice, in perfect tonal harmony with the distant hum of the Perfumed Garden’s mantra, insisted that there was nothing here for us to fear, that we were only going home.
“Come…come…come home…” Guy chanted, as if he, or some forest spirit, or vraiment both, had read my thoughts, or indeed as if his thoughts, and mine, and the voice of that spirit, were but notes of the same transcendent mantric chord.
And then without further rational thought, I found myself bounding hand in hand with Guy in great leaps toward the Perfumed Garden, like moths to a flame, like motes of dust rising up a great shaft of golden light to greet the sun.
Nor did we pause for a moment until we stood as groundling insects at the base of that mighty floral metropolis.
Groves and hedges of brilliantly colored flowers rose up the gentle slope of the great tree crown before me to fill the world. And I beheld multitudes of my own kind buzzing and dancing about them like an ecstatic swarm of bees on a midsummer’s mother lode of floral beneficence.
A vast multitude of Bloomenkinder, a golden citizenry of naked and physically splendid humans, enlivened the avenues and groves of this city of the flowers with their recomplicated and utterly graceful pavane. They dined at great floral banquets, they slumbered in municipal parks, they engaged in arcane civic activity impossible to fathom at this remove, they sauntered in streams along the avenues between the flowers like gay boulevardiers, and all with a choreographed perfection of motion and timing which would have done any maestro of the dance proud.
But while the resemblance to the buzzings and scurryings of bees was given the lie by the way the Bloomenkinder made art of every motion with all the style and grace appropriate to our mammalian species and then some, when it came to the collective mantra of a beehive, the metaphor was far closer to the sensual and spiritual reality.
For the mighty wordless human song that filled the world, like the buzzing of a million bees, was indeed a collective mantric chorus that vibrated to the spiritual and genetic wavelength of its own species. Mayhap this soul-stirring thrum of human joy might have been a mere drone of monotony to an apiary ear, just as in the buzz of the bees we hear nothing but the dead hiss of insecto
id static. But just as the buzzing bees must hear the song of their spirit in the voices of their fellows, so did this mighty mantra of the collective human spirit draw my singularity toward union with the chorus of the whole.
Indeed I found myself humming that mantra under my breath from somewhere deep in the depths of my throat, and it seemed as if my very bones were vibrating to its harmony, and I became aware that Guy was singing it as well, his mouth wide open in a radiant smile, the sound pouring up through him in a single mighty tone, that selfsame tone which had resonated in the voice which had first spoken through him the day before, and which now seemed to speak to my own soul.
“Ah…ah…ah…om…ah…ah…ah…home…”
I turned to Guy with my own blissful smile. Slowly, his face turned itself toward me, so that I could see upon it the mirror of my own joy. I squeezed his hand. “Oh Guy,” I said softly, “I just didn’t know…”
Guy seemed to look into my eyes for a long moment, and it seemed as if several spirits were regarding me from the endless depths of his. The gay Child of Fortune whose wit had won me on the streets of Great Edoku, the Merchant Prince who had lavishly rescued me from penury, the deeper and darker Guy who had emerged psychotropically on the Unicorn Garden, the nascent Charge Addict, the obsessed and intrepid psychonaut of the Bloomenveldt, the creature who had made love to me last night in the forest, they were all there behind his eyes, they were all at peace with each other, they were all one, and in that moment, vraiment, did I find it in my heart to love them all.
And so hand in hand, two hearts beating as one, two spirits humming the same glorious mantra, or so at the time it seemed, did two no longer lost children of man enter their Perfumed Garden.
We walked in dazzlement down the aisles of great flowers, through a living kaleidoscope of brilliant colors and achingly lovely pastel shadows, for the very air within the Perfumed Garden was suffused and romanced by the bright sunlight streaming through thousands upon thousands of translucent petals, and at first I could only bathe myself in the rainbow radiance and laugh in delight.
Child of Fortune Page 35
