Prima materia
Yes, yes. Without doubt. Certain:
It was near the end of summer, and of a summer's day they lay in the shade of a great oak. The lazy creek, slowed to a creeping pace by a patina of algae and choked by a gauntlet of weeds, lolled past accompanied by its leitmotif:
MacGill and Adam crouched amid the tangle of roots along the creek's edge and splashed water on one another to cool off while Scott overturned a rock in search of crawdads. From the thin log bridge, which they had crossed to get here, Nick shouted for their attention, and they watched as he balanced, jumping up and down to roll the log.
Cecilia was there too, reclining on a picnic blanket reading a dog-eared copy of Catcher in the Rye. "Here," she said, glancing up and shading her eyes with the book. "Take my sunglasses if you're going to do that." She handed them to Daniel, who sat near her staring at the sun.
He had read of mystics, desert hermits who sitting rigid beneath the blazing sun sustained their bodies with its light. He tried to do the same, but having neither the faith nor the discipline of a mystic, he closed his dilated eyes every few seconds to stop them from burning. As though from afar, he heard:
"Now, wear them…" Cecilia chided.
The world was washed away with a wave of soft blue light. And Daniel felt as though he ceased to see things, as though he were looking upon everything from underneath, from the bottom of a pool. He lay down a few feet from Cecilia where, neglected, the grass had grown too long, his body so sensitive he could perceive each blade. The hum of bees and horseflies gave way to a sort of silence-a peculiar silence resulting not from a dearth of sounds but rather from a reluctance to perceive them.
Like a figure in a painting, Cecilia lay there silently, her hands hovering above her head, the book held fast between them. For a moment Daniel's brain forgot to flip the retinal image upright, and his vision hung that way-Cecelia reaching down to turn the page. The branches of the oak, like roots, groped downward into the soft, bluish earth, and the thick trunk elongated into a line. Balanced as upon a pin, the flower of the world hovered improbably overhead. The grassy sky became a shallow estuary undulating with widgeon grass and eelgrass. And Daniel floated through it all, gazing down on light blue clods of earth.
He focused once more on Cecilia: above her now, the picnic blanket checkered with waves of dappled light, undulating pulses, and she seemed to pulse with them. But she was no longer herself as her sun dress, fluttering momently, became part of the blanket, which was in turn part of the majestic world-flora. Daniel too became the checkerboard of light on the picnic blanket underneath the oak tree. Life seemed fluid and fragile, like a filament of web, and he seemed a spider, spinning and connecting from this to that, detecting a pattern only in brief, backward glances.
At once, the grassy ocean swelled. The waters embraced everything. Daniel sat up in fright and removed the sunglasses, and the world once more tumbled headlong into order. The glare of the sun effaced the upper and lower waters. They evaporated into mercurial rivulets and coalesced into a single radiance.
From atop the hill beyond the creek: the crunch and rumble of wheels on gravel. Like a wall, a cloud of dust rose sharply from the road. The radiance once more rent in pieces. The separation of the "one" and the "rest": a word. Yes, it seemed to him that way: a word crawled across the sky just beyond the crest of the hill. She was so like a word, cutting the world in two, as she descended the hill and came to rest on the far side of the water, snapping a picture of them to preserve the moment and to isolate it from every other moment.
He felt as though he stood upon the very seam separating the future from the past. He didn't perceive the seam as the present, per se, but as an impalpable film. Traversing the semi-permeable membrane between event and memory, each moment passed away to a shadowy region of regret and forgetfulness and loss, and Daniel was at once overcome by nostalgia.
He had yet to learn to gloss over the veneer of days and events without falling through to the ocean of regret that churns beneath. Forever saddened by the naked transience of things, he wanted always to hold on to each instant, to savor it, to exhaust its fullness. His nostalgia was inexperience resounding as a silent urge, a dull and wordless ache, a feeling like a faint blue flickering flame licking at the underside of a surface tension. Or something as incomprehensible, something just as inscrutable and inenarrable.
Riding home with Laura that afternoon, his mind still swarming with the heat and hallucinations, his senses humming and befuddled, that familiar regret crept over him. As she kissed his cheek, he sensed the moment slipping below the surface, plunging ever farther from him with ineluctable gravity, sinking down, down to the depths of silence and forgetfulness, forever gone and lost.
By the time he made it inside the house, he was already nostalgic.
Shiftless summer days blended languidly, one into the next. Many had been the summer afternoons whiled away driving aimlessly down winding back roads, through woods and cornfields. Jack MacGill knew every bridge and hill and railroad crossing in the county where, at a fast clip, the car caught air. Brief instances of flight-those splendid split seconds suspended above asphalt-freed them from the slow enervation of life in their small town. Baseball caps on backward, the wind against their sunburned faces, smoking cigarettes, tearing down a dirt road and stirring up a dusky cloud-that was joy.
But already the season slouched toward autumn; in just two days school would start again. On the penultimate afternoon of their summer break, they indulged especially in speed. With Adam at his side, Nick, Scott, and Daniel in the backseat, MacGill raced his 1975 Dodge Dart past stretching shadows, over rolling hills, through golden stalks of corn. Flying past Nicodemus Farm on Route 194, while the others screamed "Mooooooo!" in unison, MacGill risked losing his hat to lean out and flip off a group of lowing cattle. He turned right onto Stauffer Road, and when they hit the bridge over Israel Creek the car flew dangerously high into the air. They hung there for what seemed minutes before landing with a jarring bang. After doubling back through town, they barreled down Frederick Street at breakneck speed, and everyone risked his hat to give the high school a high-flying bird. Late in the afternoon, they often loitered in the parking lot behind the local shopping center, smoked cigarettes beneath Devilbiss Bridge, or lay about in the tall grass at the park or between the mossy, crumbling headstones of Glade Cemetery. But invariably, as evening approached-well past eight o'clock that time of year-they would drive from Walkersville, through Frederick, to MacGill's house. And so it was this fine end-of-summer day: having wound their way up a verdured foothill, the boys perched themselves atop a cluster of rocks. Though merely a few large, shapeless stones alongside a neighborhood street, the Rocks seemed every bit as numinous as granite herms; they marked, in reality, the imaginary corner of the young men's collective boyhood.
As evening turned to night, the vesper golden glow that played atop the clustered spires of Frederick dissolved into the deep-blue star-spangled sky. In the valley, wobbling baubles of light danced like fireflies across a field: Frederick looked different and unreal. Daniel gazed down, wondering how the town and the surrounding countryside could look so wonderful from here. He felt sometimes the vast openness of land below was his alone-even though he'd never wanted it or asked for it-that he could sweep up those will-o'-the-wisps and leave behind acres of blank space. If he really wanted to. Other times, he felt the valley was a brimming bowl or an ocean; he would sit and wait for it to rise up and sweep him off the Rocks.
Blank pages. The crisp smell of virgin paper bound in a brown cover.
Dry leaves crackled under Daniel's feet, and in the distance the sun sank behind the Catoctin mountains; daylight moldered into its component parts, vermilion and pink and gold. In the whorls of clouds he saw naked girls and angels clad in sunset. The sun is a god! he wrote. He stopped and sat and, with his pencil, began to pry from the dirt a small, round stone.
Romantic and melancholy, autumn was his favorite season. He found it fitting he'd been born on the equinox. Summer haze and heat waves were uncomfortable, the atmosphere felt thick, and inhaling the humid honeysuckle air was like breathing through cotton candy. But fall was a time when he could commune with nature, which to Daniel was his backyard or the margin of trees and weeds overgrowing the railroad tracks behind the soccer field of his old middle school. He enjoyed the incongruous coupling of the chill in the air and the warm colors of the trees-there was a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky. He especially liked the sound of leaves crackling underfoot. Only in fall, inspired to natural piety, could he write things like "The sun is a god."
On this almost-autumn evening, it was just beginning to grow dark. All the same, he sat in the backyard, the sky fading above him as he wrote in his journal, straining his eyes to find the faint blue lines on the page.
Today is the first time I write in this "tome," so I will start on pg. 1.
A self-evident conclusion to most, but to a fourteen-year-old writing for the first time in a newly acquired journal, it was a statement of utmost importance. It didn't mean, "I've never written in this book before, so I'll start on the first page," it meant, "This is the beginning of something…" Such statements delight fourteen-year-olds; they grip the young imagination, giving it a sense of certainty and purpose. Such statements are magical invocations.
I just like the idea of having this catharsis, this place to write when I need it. Today I will refrain from catharsis. Today catharsis doesn't work. Laura: one word catharsis. It is finished. The catharsis, I mean. This is the beginning.
A wind rose from the west, stirring the pages of his book. The sun went the rest of the way down, the lack of multicolored backlight rendering the clouds again inchoate and meaningless.
His dad called from the back porch that he should come in. "You look down," he said as Daniel entered the house. "What's wrong?"
"I went with the sun," said the son.
October 13. It was the night of the Homecoming dance. Having outgrown his dress shoes, Daniel had to borrow a pair of his dad's. Nor did he have a suit. In a pair of dark slacks and a cheap green blazer that hung on him the way it had on its wire hanger, he felt himself stuck awkwardly between childhood and adulthood.
The dance was less a formal event and more an elaborate adolescent mating ritual. Celebrating the return of the football team, those goons, was just an excuse to get the student body's lap moist. Every second spent shuffling two by two around the dance floor throbbed with the madding desire to escape the steamy gymnasium and its crepe paper decor, to ditch the monkey suits and satin dresses, to drink warm beer, and to fuck like beasts. The girls were like clumsy carpenters, knocking the walls to find a stud. The football players knew they would be getting blowjobs that night, and every pimply chump between the ages of fourteen and eighteen was hoping for the same. Everyone wanted to play quarterback that night.
Daniel, however, was different. Certainly, his inviting Laura to the dance was a Hail Mary-plea for something, but something much vaguer than the concrete act of intercourse. This pining adolescent had made the mistake of irreconcilably separating "Sex" and "Love," so that the concepts stood in the corners of his mind like two pugilists raring to clobber the bejabbers out of one another. That evening he wanted Love, not some bloated affair that calls attention to itself with the connivance of genitalia, but Love-pure and simple. (The bulge in his pants he got looking at his date was humiliating.)
His love for Laura had begun to grow in him with the impulsiveness of a weed, and he had yet to untangle himself enough from his vegetable love to understand the mystery of why he submitted to it. Pretending as though some remote and holy goddess of love had given him Laura to worship as a divine proxy, he perceived the fountainhead of his infatuation as something beyond himself. He couldn't see that what attracted him to her flashing eyes and floating hair was neither sex nor love (divine or earthly), but a lack of something in himself. With all the passionate tumult of a clinging hope, an unyielding emptiness held him to the belief that life would change ineluctably because of one event or person, that through one girl he could be metamorphosed into something better than what he was.
Daniel put all his faith in this belief. Especially as they got into a car and headed to the party at Jack MacGill's house.
In midnight darkness, he lay next to her. The pitch black itself seemed the medium through which soft gasps and moans, broken occasionally by a disembodied giggle, came to him. Tactile sensations, as well, seemed to come as though from afar through the intermediary blackness. Even his thoughts came to him though the blackness.
Into the sightless void of the small room his imagination cast itself, as though he were a pinhole projecting what was happening within him. The room seemed to become a tiny universe, and the blackness became ether through which they swam like planets. Although he knew the others were near, he felt as though they traveled in distant, separate ellipses, each with its own rotation, its own force of gravity. A few would hold steady to their courses, but mostly they would fall into orbit around some other. He felt as though he alone had no gravity and no aspect. He was simply lunging through space.
"Daniel," MacGill whispered. "What are you doing?" The phantasmagoria dispersed in a flash of paperboard and phosphorus sesquisulfide, Daniel's imagined cosmos retreating to the shadows cast by the light of MacGill's match.
This was MacGill's final port of call on his circumnavigation of the bedroom. At each previous stop he'd set things in motion. In his wake, groups of two or three continued to fondle and kiss one another. The darkness blinded them to all distinctions. There were no longer sexes to distinguish: they were as they had been in the womb, neither men nor women, boys nor girls, but pre-sexual beings indiscriminant in their enjoyment of one another.
MacGill handed the match to Daniel, reached over to put on some music, then blew out the flame. It seemed darker than before. He bent down and kissed first Daniel then Laura. Daniel listened close, wondering anxiously what would follow. He heard another kiss. Laura arched her back and rose up then slowly gently lay back down-Daniel's senses swooned to the sound of her soft excited breaths. Then, with a touch, MacGill parted her thighs. Daniel slid his hand between them. He was afraid to stick his sweaty finger in, afraid it might be bitten off or that it might get stuck. He imagined falling into that deeper darkness, finding his egress folded firmly shut behind him. Then he closed his eyes and faithfully plunged in a trembling forefinger. Suddenly Daniel felt he had himself become a planet with a sun, moving through a warm, liquid universe…
But in the gray hours of morning, as donserly light through yonder window broke, Laura-hair disheveled, missing her bra and one of her shoes-rose and silently stole away.
The first dawn of consciousness often coincides with a sexual experience, be it a hand sliding beneath tight cotton panties or a pair of come-stained jeans. Sex sends up a flare for consciousness, illuminating a heretofore-unseen part of creation, a nether region of the self as of yet unexplored. It is an initiation into a new rite of life. Before sexual contact, there's no understanding of the other-one is a solipsist, like a joey who knows only the claustral confines of his pouch. Such vivid and bewildering contact with another human being brings multiplicity to one's world. He is no longer alone; there's at least one other groping with him in the darkness. A young man first sees himself, separate from that darkness, in the soft phosphorescence of glowing ovaries; his cock is the first part of him to rise from the darkness into the light. This is the conception of consciousness.
This is a beginning:
Though unbeknownst to him, with that sweaty and unsteady hand Daniel had broken a hymen. Not hers (for that had, in fact, been broken some time ago) but rather his: the barrier between himself and the world. After that night, having had his fingers in the warm source of creation, Daniel was endowed with a consciousness. But his embryonic consciousness was something unseemly: a homunculus lumbering to the fore. Or: a rough-hewn chunk of stone, unrefined and half-buried still in the earth, waiting to be exhumed, cut, and polished.