by Matt Cardin
“I thought I’d find you here,” she said. “I could see it in your face. You needed to get away and reflect.”
It was really too much, the way she read me as if we had been together only yesterday. Somehow she looked even prettier when I was angry with her.
“What could you see in my face, Lisa? How the hell do you always do that?”
“I wish I could tell you. I really do.” Her voice trembled and her eyes begin to glitter with tears again. “It’s like seeing another level to things. Do you remember learning to read when you were young? First there were just black marks and shapes scattered on a page. Then, like magic, they started to mean something. It’s kind of like that.”
“Well, it scares me. It always scared me.” I turned my face away, searching for neutral space, and found I was now staring at Christ’s nail-pierced feet on the large crucifix hanging above us.
“And you don’t think it scares me?” she said. “Do you want to guess how much more of what’s going on with Paul right now I can see than you can? Do you think I want to be able to see where he’s going? Do you think I like seeing him drifting away?” She was crying for real now, and I had nothing to say in return.
“Please,” she said at last, struggling for control, “I have to ask you something. It sounds insane. I know it will sound insane, especially since I know how much you must hate me. But I have to ask.” She moved closer to me on the pew, and I tried not to smell her perfume or look at her breasts.
“First,” she said, “I have to tell you something. Please just listen. Please don’t make up your mind until I’m finished. Can you promise me that?” I avoided her eyes but said yes. Her breath was still labored from crying, and I could feel it on my face and hands, hot and moist, like a wet feather.
“Paul and I have been growing in new directions since you left. Our spiritual lives have taken a new turn. We’ve been exploring some things you may have heard of, certain pagan traditions with ancient roots. They’re all about loving the earth and learning to feel at home with her. We’ve been learning to experience nature as a kind of enchanted garden that’s powered by spirit and permeated with love.” She eyed me then, and for once, in a moment of insight so intense it caused my breath to catch, I knew what she was going to say before she said it: “I think what we’ve been cultivating is the exact opposite of the vision you had in the rain forest.”
My revulsion was immediate. She had no right to speak of my experience. It was mine, my own special revelation and cross to bear. Every instinct I possessed told me that I didn’t want to hear where she was going with this, especially not if she was going to try and demonstrate some connection between what I had experienced in South America and my spiritual past with her and Paul. But in the face of her fresh-wept beauty, and amid the holy hush of the chapel, I felt strangely helpless to protest.
“I really am afraid that what you’ve experienced is our fault,” she continued. “I’m only just now learning about it, but there’s a web of invisible interconnections between us all. It’s so intricate and beautiful. It’s like a spiritual network that joins everything on the planet. Sometimes these connections are especially strong, like the ones between you and Paul and me.” I thought of my hallucination of glowing cords earlier, but said nothing.
“I think,” she said, “that when you left, we may have accidentally sent a terrible energy rushing in your direction. I think when Paul and I started trying to fall in love with the earth so soon after we hurt you the way we did, you received the opposite end of it. I’m not really sure how these things work. I may not even be sure what I’m trying to say right now. But I think you ended up seeing the opposite of everything we were trying to understand. When you described your vision in the jungle, it sounded exactly like the dark side of the beauty we’re seeking.”
And there it was again, that cold fist squeezing the breath out of my chest. I barely had time to register it before she did an extraordinary thing: without breaking the rhythm of her words, she reached out a hand and laid it on my thigh. It was a simple gesture, but it sent shockwaves rolling through my entire being. More specifically, it sent tingles crawling up into my groin, and a long-buried part of me suddenly lit up, glowing like a spark, at the thought that maybe, just maybe, Lisa’s reasons for searching me out and asking me to come home had been more complex than I had suspected.
“I’m not asking you to believe all this,” she was saying. “I’m not trying to convince you. I just want you to know how we’ve thought of these things over the past few years, and how we’ve regretted doing what we did. Earlier tonight, when you told me what you went through, I realized the extent of the damage we’ve done.” After a pause, she scooted even closer, and my slight spark of arousal ignited into a small flame. It was fascinating, really, to watch it all happening from a vantage point of objectivity. For I still felt that the greater part of me was tucked away back in that safe meditative cave hidden high up on a riverbank. My flame of arousal, now growing into a bona fide blaze of lust, was something happening at a distance, something I was observing as a spectator. So was Lisa’s beautiful face moving ever closer to mine, and also the feel of her delicate red-nailed fingers gripping my thigh with growing urgency. I knew the feeling of remoteness and safety had to be an illusion. But this didn’t take away from the heady reality of its seeming, nor from the pleasure I derived from it.
She was speaking to me in a seductive whisper now: “But I do want to ask you something. Just listen to me before you decide. There’s a way for us to get Paul back. The three of us share a special energy. I know you’ve felt it. Maybe you’ve even seen it. The thing is, we can use that energy. You and I can call out to Paul, wherever he is. We can send him a message. We can light a beacon to show him the way home, and we can give him the strength to make the journey.” When she batted her eyes and assumed a kind of coy expression, her meaning was instantly clear, and the nature of her request would have been obvious even without her next words: “All we have to do is reconnect, you and I, on the most intimate level.” When her red lips curled in what might have been the faintest of wicked smiles, I felt waves of warmth crash through me.
“Please,” she said. “It will heal you, too. It will take away the vision of too much. We’ll balance in the middle, and Paul and I will take back the energy we aimed at you. You can have your life back.” If she did not send the next words directly into my brain as a telepathic transmission, then she must have spoken them without moving her lips: You can have me back, too.
By that point she had no need to say anything else, for I was hopelessly hers. She had worked her magic with consummate skill, and I was consumed with lust. And what I lusted after was as much my former self and my own redemption as it was Lisa and her body. I wanted to possess her and regain my soul in a single stroke. And if we could help Paul in the process, in some obscure way that made no sense to me, then so much the better.
These thoughts and desires whirled within me as she took me by the hand and led me from the chapel. The giddy feeling helped to augment the sensation of spectatorship, and so it seemed almost like a cinematic special effect when I experienced—I actually experienced, as a physical perception—the hallowed atmosphere of the chapel folding back in on itself like a flower, preparing to lie in wait for the next soul-hungry supplicant. I seemed to glide above the floor when she pulled me down the hallway and toward the room I had entered as a stranger only a few short hours ago.
The floating feeling continued until she turned to face me beside Paul’s bed, where I thought suddenly of the prehistoric bone lying partially uncovered back in the desert. The memory brought back a sweet stab of pain, and there was a moment of confusion as my resolve threatened to come unraveled. What in God’s name was I doing? What did I think it would accomplish? How could it end any way but badly? I realized everything was happening too fast, it was all rushing ahead with a seemingly inbuilt logic that was in fact completely irrational.
But then her
hands were on me, pulling me down to the floor, and they banished all other concerns. Her flesh-and-blood warmth and softness were irresistibly real. The memory of the dry-desert bone with its accompanying dry-desert sadness couldn’t compete with this vivid reality. “Stepping out of your head and into the reality of the present is the whole point,” I heard Paul’s remembered voice saying. Common sense was out the window, too. I couldn’t think about the fact that the hospital staff might walk in on us. I couldn’t think about Paul lying comatose beside us on the bed. I could think only of the heat of her body, and the pressure of her touch, and the wetness of her lips, like the petals of a flower in the rain forest, kissing first my eyes and then my mouth, drawing me out of myself and into a fleshy reality that was far more ecstatic than any experience of isolated spectatorship could ever be.
6
The flow of time became a river of burning gold as everything went all liquid and surreal. The sound of my breath filled the whole universe like salt water sizzling on a cosmic ocean shore. I had never been so sexually inflamed. All my repressed rage and horror flowed through my limbs like a torrent, and focused itself on the burning point of contact between us. She was on top of me, and I grappled violently with her back and buttocks, pulling her so tightly against me that I worried I might snap her in two like a doll. She received it all without complaint. In fact, her passion, if anything, surpassed mine. She swiped her tongue over my lips and eyelids. Her nails scored parallel lines down my neck and chest. Her hair whipped my face like the wings of a frenzied bird.
When she had her orgasm, she arched so violently that I thought my hipbones would break. A moment later my own climax sent my head spasming backwards, and the crack of the floor tile against my skull exploded stars into my vision. I lost consciousness briefly.
When I returned to myself, she had risen and was bending naked over Paul’s unconscious form. The air was chilly against my cooling flesh, and my eyes felt hot and gritty. I watched her caress Paul’s face and speak tender words to him. Her nudity, which only moments before had been a veritable feast for my starving eyes, now looked slick and rubbery. She cooed to him as if he were a baby, imploring him to come back from whatever dark dimension had swallowed him. Left to myself and my thoughts, there was no way to feel that I was somehow outside or above the situation. It was all too real, and I was sickened at the thought of what I had just done.
But when I moved to sit up and cover myself, I found to my astonishment that my limbs were stiff as a corpse’s. My arms felt as if they were shackled with lead weights. It took all my effort just to raise my head an inch. An invisible weight rested on my chest like an anvil, constricting my ribcage and forcing me to struggle for breath. Even as I began to worry that the crack to my head might have really injured me, the physical constriction gave way to a deeper one, and with astonished horror I felt something dragging my spirit down into a bottomless well.
Sex had never been an ultimately pleasurable experience for me. The feeling of lassitude afterward, as if I had been attacked by some kind of parasite and drained to the point of death, had invariably spoiled it. I had always felt like a walking dead man for days afterward. It had taken me years to connect my occasional feelings of an almost lethal sluggishness with my rare sexual encounters, and once I had made the connection, I had determined to try and forget that side of life altogether.
Now, it was as if all those former spiritual sappings had been mere preludes to this one great stealing of energy. I was falling backwards down a mine shaft. The ceiling receded. Lisa’s naked form grew taller above me. The wheezing of the respirator reverberated like whispers in a cathedral. The heaviness in my limbs began to dissipate, not because I was coming to life but because I was plummeting inward and leaving my body behind.
Above me, beside me, Lisa looked more and more like an elongated figure in a surrealist painting. Still leaning over Paul’s body, she reached down a rubbery stick-arm and probed between her thighs, gathering some of our fluids onto her fingers. Then she raised them to his lips and continued to whisper things that no longer sounded like language, but like a wordless chant, harsh and melodic.
A moment later his hand twitched. The rhythm of the respirator grew more insistent as it struggled with a competing rhythm. And Lisa uttered a sharp cry of joy.
The room continued to recede. I continued to fall backwards into a well of infinite seclusion. And yet I saw and heard everything around me. There was no end to the receding, no far edge of exile where I would find myself cut off from all contact with the external world. It was as if a hole had been punched in the back of my private cave to reveal an infinite, sucking void on the other side. The thought arose that in the hell of black emptiness opening out below me, I would not be allowed even the small comfort of forgetfulness. I would not be allowed to reside alone in a dank spiritual dungeon where I could forget that I had once tasted the air of a rain forest and smelled the dust of a desert. There would be nothing but distance—distance between the world and me, distance between everything I had ever loved and the possibility of grasping it, distance between my innate longing for spiritual wholeness and my ability to pursue it.
The restraint on my limbs let go abruptly. I blinked and rose to my elbows. Lisa was rushing to put on her clothes and throwing mine at me. In his bed, Paul was stirring with ever more vigorous motions. I knew I had just participated in some sort of rite, but I was totally ignorant of its nature. I only knew that my life force had been transferred to Paul, and that he had gladly accepted it. For this was, after all, nothing but the logical extension of the theft he had committed three years ago. The little moment of happiness unfolding beside me, where he had opened his eyes, and where he and Lisa were touching each other’s faces with shared tears of reunion, was not meant for me. I was excluded by a gulf that now separated me not only from them but from everyone and everything, from all of the ten thousand things that made up this vast and dismal universe.
I rose on legs that belonged to a dead man and finished putting on my clothes. With the eyes of a dead man, I surveyed for a final time the sight of a shared love that should have been mine. And with these new eyes, I annihilated it all. I brought the sight within me and felt it slip away instantly, back through that hole in the cave wall, where it sparked out into ambient nothingness and disappeared forever. No memory was left, no feeling, no emotion or reaction to the things before me. The sight of Paul and Lisa was being born anew in my consciousness with each passing instant, and with each new instant I was devouring it and watching it be reborn again. It was like swallowing an ocean and finding that I was still thirsty. It was like eating the world and finding that I was still ravenous. I watched the two of them press down under the weight of my gaze, trembling with an unknown terror that confused them both, clinging to each other for warmth and comfort. Then I turned and left the room without looking back.
The hallway was still dim with nighttime illumination. The nurse still sat reading her paperback novel in a pale aureole of lamplight. When I looked at her, she shifted in her seat and glanced about her with a look of confusion and fear. She did not appear to see me when I passed right by her. I shared the elevator to the ground floor with an old black man pushing a janitor’s cart. He appeared not to notice my presence, not even when I looked directly at him and saw his face blanch with dread as the visual impression of him passed through me on its way to everlasting oblivion. When I exited through the lobby and passed several people bound on early morning errands, none of them noticed me, but they gasped and nearly stumbled when I took the sight of them into myself.
A light rain was falling in the parking lot. I paused just outside the sliding glass doors to lift my face to the murky sky, where a delicate flash of lightning outlined a mountain of dark clouds. A moment later, a rumble of thunder rattled the windows behind me. I stood there with the rain spattering my face and hands like tappings on a distant roof. And from my fixed position there in the midst of it all, rooted at the center
of my perceptual universe like the eye of a cyclone, I annihilated everything: the clouds and thunder, windows and pavement, even the slick yellow reflections of the street lamps in the myriad puddles dotting the asphalt. The depth inside me was bottomless, and the life around me to be devoured, infinite.
The rain kept falling for hours while the eastern sky behind me grew gray with the approaching dawn, and while I stood looking at everything with a new pair of eyes that would never grow old, and that would accompany me to deserts or rain forests or wherever I might go next, devouring and renewing all things in my path, and forever finding them insufficient.
The dawn, when it came, was cold.
Blackbrain Dwarf
But of course everything was all wrong. Derek knew it the minute he opened his eyes and perceived the vileness resounding from every angle and object in the room. Indeed, how could it be otherwise in a red-glowing world where the stench of blacksouls mounts to a deadening sky?
Then he awoke fully and realized he was dream-thinking again. It took even longer than usual for the waking world to slide into focus while his psyche struggled to flush away the dregs of the putrescent dreamland that had lately been casting an ever-lengthening shadow across his days. And even after the mental purification was otherwise accomplished, when he could think, feel, look, and smell without the black-red reality of the otherworld interposing itself between his awareness and the prosy solidity of the white-walled master bedroom of his two-thousand-square-foot suburban house—even then, he still caught a glimpse of wrongness pressing in at every conceivable crack, hitching a ride on the fiery beams of sunlight that bled through the drapes, peering with beady black eyes through the dark spots in the mottled wooden texture of the bureau next to the bed.
