The Night of Spontaneity
Gone, Gone, Gone Beyond, Gone Beyond the Beyond, Hail the Goer!
Adam closed the door to the laundry room behind him, and a sliver of light died in the darkness that rushed in around them, isolating them, preventing any return. He upset a basket of laundry on the floor, the fresh smell of clean linen. They lay down, all three, she between the boys. They lay in darkness amid the linen on the floor. The room was warm and humid, an electric hum from the corner where the only light was a small red glow at the bottom of a water heater humming electrically, glowing dimly. Daniel had lost all sense of space, all care for time. Without his bearings, he had but Penny and Adam, like a raft from a wreck midway on its journey across midnight, and the small red light that glowed from nowhere was his sole star. The shore soon slipped away.
He was kissed, lips were kissing his, the taste of cigarettes, her tongue. He kissed her. He was touched, her hands were on his body. And his hands bumped another's as he slipped off her moist warm towel, sliding it off her warm moist skin. Her arms lifted, the wet bra washed away by darkness, gone and lost, the jetsam of their midnight voyage. The sails were hoist. He saw rough hands passing thick rope, and his and the other's hands pulled faster to haul up the anchor. They were under way. Sailing off to the land of a Lithuanian Gypsy king to find Her. But no it was not her, it was not her lips, her mouth, her tongue, her naked breasts, his mouth upon them, her skin, it was not her warm soft thighs, her smoky breath upon his neck, her small hands pulling at his belt and at the other's. It was not her back arched beneath his hands and those hot foreign ones they encountered in the dark, that crossed her naked skin to pull the moist cotton down her thighs adding to the pile of clothes, everything everything the jetsam of their midnight sail toward someplace unknown and distant but never to meet her. It was not her heart beating madly in that chest, not her hand guiding his and the other's down. Nor was it his own heart beating within him now but some mere animal's.
Gätê.
O, wanderer, whither wandereth thou? A spunky spelunker, his hand approached the invisible, inscrutable cave, but stopped a moment atop a hill to rest. A lost Van Gogh: Mont Venus à nuit, a shaggy mount rising by a shore, the blue-green moon setting behind it in a swirl. A magic grove, the goddess' grotto—a dark and pagan place but one he'd visited before. But no, that was— It was not her now, yet she was with him there, in that holy place. He almost wished she did not haunt it, that he could enjoy its numinosity alone. But then her presence there inspired him. He would inhabit this place, yes, inhabit it, and build for her there a monastery, a great Mont Saint-Michel from which to ponder and to worship her, he would reclaim it in her name and worship her there as he had on every corner, in every hallway, at every moment since he'd met her. And now he felt the tide swelling in, stranding him there upon that mound, the spirit of her departed. Goddessless and full of trepidation, he tripped farther down and down.
Like a stage, its curtains parting. Again the trembling fear of falling in and finding them folded firmly shut. Fretting the moist nubule, the pop-o-matic node, he fights back again a flood of terror. A leak! And like a Little Dutch Boy he should plug it. So strange to the touch… Those fleshy folds, those curtains parting! All the O! the world's an O! a stage, and O! the men and women, the boys and girls, are merely players… Swimming, diving down and drowning, down she dives, she dives to him as he sinks. But not to save him. And from afar a distant voice like singing OooOooOoo, like ripples through the water, waves, like waves of Ooo from a distance, as though he were still bobbing on the surface hearing just the slight reverberation of a mermaid song. Till human voices… And before him seems to swirl, now growing closer, now all around, swirls the greenish-bluish liquid surface of a nebulous Neptune, a dreamy drug-induced underwater Neptune, with leaden waves and blue-gray, green-blue swirls of vangogh grass. It is not her. She is not she. But she is here and now… O, how here and now she is! Like a wave forever lapping on his lapping on his lap. She is. Infinitude rushes in on him—sweeps him from himself, threatening to obliterate him. He pulls away, he pulls away, he pulls away, swimming frantically to get his head above the salty froth, and pulling Penny back up with him to the surface.
A great gasp of air before her lips were on his once more, and clutching her he sank again just below the surface, drawing deep breaths through her as though through newfound gills. Another's hand touched his against her skin, or he felt it touch him through her. He had forgotten, as though they'd been alone, and he was strangely comforted to find another groping with them through the tarry muck of midnight. He let her go, let her float to the other, into those arms wrapping round her like long sticky strands of seaweed. His hand traced up the hard line of the other's hand, up the arm that enwrapped her and pulled her back down while Daniel bobbed safely on the surface. And through her, he felt the other's heart-pounding presence, his mad sweating existence, which was a comfort in the thick black suffocating dark. But just as soon as he'd made contact, just as soon as he thought he could make out the wink of glowing jelly eyes across the body of the girl between them, he sensed that the other was now diving down.
Had Adam must have told her, yes, and down she'd he could hardly believe it but so it was and nothing changing that now. That was the first, the very first. He sighed and lay back in the black and floated, letting them sink deep into each other alone, without him. Adam and Penny continued to clip and kiss in the dark, but Daniel felt himself drifting from them, falling away. He felt as though he were unraveling slowly, slowly coming undone, everything relaxing but falling apart, floating away like flotsam, diffused, dispersed, disappearing. The thunk overtook him completely, pushing him down deep into a sort of silty shore, the soft warm feeling embracing him, enveloping. All three soon started to fall asleep. Three soiled and dirty things amidst piles of fresh, clean linen.
Brokeneck Elpenor. Poor, poor Elpenor. Fell from the roof and lived no more, for too much
lotos he had ate. Gätê. He saw again those thick hands gathering and cutting thick ropes.
A swollen Neptunian face smiled upon the surface of a surface of a pool the surface
of a pool with gentle ripples rippling gently across a drown Neptunian face
upon a pool. Those ragged hands pulling at the rope and cutting loose the
moorings. Hauling up the anchor. The ship wheeling and pitching to-
ward another shore—a distant descendant of the Lithuanian Gyp-
sy king. Beyond beyond beyond. As he drifted off to sleep, he
cruised back to his love at the speed of dreamy thoughts,
returning to Laura from this sordid scene. A small
red light his polestar. Gätê. A panting animal,
he sought her out again in darkness to be
purified. Gätê gätê. Wrapped up with
Penny's and Adam's and his own
naked sweating flesh, struggling
to escape but dragged back
down by thunk. Pärägätê.
But dreamily returning
to his true love, to Her.
Päräsämgätê. To her,
he would return to
her—he would.
Bodhi svähä!