No One

by George Bowering

  “It could be, I usually think, one of two things, or maybe both.”

  “I do like your two things,” he said, as if speaking for an audience.

  “And you do use them. In that sense you are a user.”

  “Before you decided to thrust them in my face . . .”

  “I am not the —”

  “What two things were you thinking of, regarding my door play?”

  “When you tie my hands and hang me from the door top, you could be seeking a proof of power and a renewal of male potency.”

  “Male potency?”

  “A return to the boyish extravagance of erection.”

  “I get that when I follow you up your stairs and see something of what is under your skirt, and I think you know that routine.”

  He was stripped of all clothing and she was still wearing all her clothes except her plain shoes, which were side by side near the door, as if an invisible woman were standing in them. This nakedness beside her clothedness was a bit ixnay at first, as if he were in a cold draft, but he soon relaxed like candle wax descending, or some other easy metaphor, and she did not so much attend to him as tell him what the other thing was.

  “Or it could be a compensatory hour of power, something not unlike the other thing, but in this case not confusable with the give and take of sexual detail. Just plain power, or enough like it to make a trodden psyche feel better.”

  “Meaning?”

  “It makes up for your connubial blitz.”

  “That’s a good one, but —”

  “Now,” she said, “I am going to revert to my usual role as servant and see whether I can give you what you want.”

  Yes, I had thought cold-pressed olive oil was really something, and at this moment, sitting at my keyboard, my mind’s eye is watching my hands spreading olive oil to the underside of Damyana’s long white breasts. But there are many seductive and mind-swirling and dangerous shrubs and trees in the Mediterranean. Take for instance

  if I have that right. You could check it out by going to flowersinisrael.com and nosing around.

  This time Damyana and I were both at a conference in Jerusalem, and not at all surprised to encounter one another. Well, we were in the city and near the university where the conference was taking place, but I don’t remember leaving Damyana’s room. I had fetched up there because of the dreadful crosswind our plane had had to negotiate on the way down to Ben Gurion Airport. I slept or tried to sleep on the bus all the way to Jerusalem. I started with my head on Damyana’s shoulder, then lowered to her lap, my feet who knows where, in the aisle, perhaps. I don’t remember much about getting to and into the hotel. I must have been an ordeal for the young security staff with their military caps not intended to be worn over such long hair.

  But I woke up naked and long and contained in white sheets and coverlets. There was a hand holding my crotch equipment, so I placed my hand on the knuckles, then the wrist, then up the arm to the shoulder, into the great nest of thick hair that I just knew was black, and when I sank my fingers into the hair, the hand holding my stuff gave a very gentle but sincere squeeze, and I knew that I was in bed with Damyana.

  I said the first words that came to me. “Mmmph, ungg, umph.”

  “Would you please get up and have a shower, so I can eat my favourite fruit?”

  This was a voice with a warm Italian accent. I threw my feet out of that high bed and fairly raced to the bathroom. The shower felt just wonderful after that long day of airplanes and buses and idiots asking for passports. I wanted to stand in it for an hour, but I also wanted to be Damyana’s favourite fruit.

  It turned out I was wrong about that.

  “I’m so happy to be your favourite and not your forbidden,” I said, towelling my hair.

  “You are wrong about that,” she said. But she pushed me over so that I landed on my back on the mass of linen. “You are my second favourite.”

  I wanted to make a clever rejoinder, but she was sitting on my mouth. When she got off, I was not in a hurry to move, poor me, and while I lay there with that wet thing on my tummy and pointing toward my chin, I saw that Damyana held in her left hand a fruit jar, and in her right a tough-looking small fruit or large berry, whatever it was.

  “Ziziphum,” she said.

  “Gesundheit,” I replied.

  “The Latin. You would not hear the Arabic for all you tried.”

  “Doesn’t look like much,” I said.

  It was a small drupe, as far as I could see, the size of an average olive, kind of a reddish brown and oval in shape. I kept my eye on Damyana’s mouth, as I so often did, and I saw her first suck the thing, then use her large white teeth to scrape its flesh from the hard pit inside. Seeing the intensity with which she did this, and hearing the sound that came from her throat as she did it, I decided to settle for my place as second favourite.

  “Would you care for a jujube?” she asked, holding it out to me, then pulling it back to the vicinity of her ear.

  “I have always liked your jujubes,” I said, determined to be lightsome even though my penis was throbbing. I gently pinched one of her large nipples between my thumb and forefinger.

  “I mean it,” she said. “Before I give you this glabrous item, I want to warn you that it might prove addictive.”

  “You are a noted academic,” I said, lifting my chin. “Surely you have done your research.”

  “Herodotus, along with a Greek poet whose name we do not really know, has had something to say about human beings who eat these things. Muhammad, too, makes a passing remark in his fifty-third sura. Says these things grow on the tree that marks the far edge of creation.”

  “Far out!”

  “Exactly,” she said, and put one in my mouth.

  Remember the first time you ever got high on peyote or magic mushrooms? It was nothing like that. Remember the first time you ever tasted real French vanilla-bean ice cream? It was like that, if you had a beautiful naked woman squatting on your chest and John Coltrane’s moist reed somehow coming through the walls and a Mediterranean sun on the long white drapes three-quarters open.

  I carefully placed the oval pit on the bedside table. “Another,” I whispered.

  “Let me,” she said, scrunching back to my belly, holding the jar in her left hand so that the sunlight shone through it, “put you inside me, and then put my favourite fruit on your tongue.”

  So it went. We finished the jar and ordered three more via room service. As soon as the handsome room service guy was gone, having been tipped nicely and shown part of a breast, my temptress unwound the sheet from her creamy off-white body and clambered back onto the bed, arms laden with large fruit jars.

  “If you will fill in the blank here, I will give you two more jujubes,” said my pusher. “What are you doing?”

  I had retrieved my iPhone 6+ from the trousers that one of us had hurled across the room. “Checking you out on the Holy Land grapevine,” I said. “You seem to have been forcing Rhamnus lotus drupes on me. Who knows what their effect might be?”

  “Look down there where your legs meet your torso,” she replied, her fingers on my sensitive nipples.

  “I think that condition shows the effect that you yourself have on me, rather than the lunch you are giving me.”

  “We could show the Lotophagi a thing or two,” she said, affecting a posture that used to be seen on the covers of 1950s soft-core smut novels. “If I put one of these in here, do you think you could get it out with your tongue? If you can, you may eat it.”

  I said “yum” a number of times.

  A while later, after a little snooze, I guess, her cellphone offered a fairly loud buzzing noise. I woke halfway out of my drowse and enquired as to its meaning.

  “We have just been alerted that this is the time at which we should be going downstairs to the plenary session of the conference,�
�� said my companion, reaching her long fingernails into the fruit jar.

  “Well,” said I, “we had better get a move on. Let’s just try Yab-Yum again and hie ourselves to the academic life.”

  She popped a jujube into my willing mouth and put a remonstrating expression on her upper face. “I sometimes wonder whether you have taken the proper academic position —”

  “Tee-hee.”

  “— attitude toward Yab-Yum and all matters tantric. Yab-Yum portrays the ancient union of wisdom and compassion.”

  “It says, somewhere.”

  “The male figure is the personification of compassion, while the female figure stands for insight.”

  “Sits for,” I said.

  “What?”

  “She doesn’t do any standing. She starts by sitting, and stays that way as long as she can.”

  “The figures, whether captured in bronze or remaining human, are enacting a sacred bliss beyond duality.”

  I am not going to describe the relative positioning of the two people involved in Yab-Yum. If you are interested, you can look it up. I should also point out that neither Yab-Yum nor the lotus fruit has anything to do with the subject of the conference in Jerusalem, which was called “Scripted Forms of Magic Knowledge: Grimoires in the Matrix of Western Cultures.”

  You can, if you have a usable imagination, picture all the ways in which human bodies can know one another. Imagine that they do so while the conversation goes on. Also keep track of the fruit jars, and call room service for more jujubes when necessary.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be giving a paper this afternoon?” I asked, picking bits of lotus off my tongue.

  “‘Errors and Omissions in the Simon Greyson Translation of The Book of Abramelin,’” she said. “Tomorrow, I think, afternoon.”

  “Don’t you think we should be attending other people’s presentations?”

  “I’m not all that sure I want to go to my own,” she said.

  We didn’t seem to have the patience for Yab-Yum, but we did try a lot of other methods of contemplation. The one I liked above all others would have struck me as impossible if someone had described it to me before this visit to the holy Moses land. Next time we called room service for more fruit jars full, we also ordered a large bottle of cold-pressed virgin olive oil. There was not, of course, to sink to the obvious, a virgin in sight, and all the pressing was pretty warm, I’d say.

  As things turned out, we did not make it to that day’s events, nor that night’s. In fact, when the hotel’s workers came to clean the room next day, we sent them away with some folded euros because we had not had the time to stock up on local currency.

  “See whether you can balance one of these wonderful-tasting fruits on there,” said my glistening companion. “I want to see whether I can pick it up with my teeth and lips.”

  A minute or less passed.

  “Beginner’s luck,” I said. “Try again.”

  “It’s on more of an angle now,” she complained. “I don’t know whether I can balance one.”

  “In the circumstances, I will allow you to hold on with your one hand,” I said.

  We didn’t make it to any of the seminar rooms on the second day, either, not even when Damyana was supposed to offer her findings regarding errors and omissions. In fact, when it was time to leave for Tel Aviv, we missed the bus, which meant we missed our plane home. Finally, it took some strenuous urging by the hotel management to get us into clothing and on the road to the coast.

  At the airport we were told we would not be permitted to carry jars of lotus drupes onto the Airbus, so during our two-hour wait we polished them off. After landing to change planes at Heathrow we were kept waiting while authorities found an airline that would agree to convey us to North America. Hateful was the dark blue sky, vaulted o’er the wine dark sea.

  In what most people, readers or not, would think a kind of minor way, I have been lucky in recent years to be able to drive up to my brother’s place in the South Okanagan sunblast and vegetate there instead of here for a few days. What you do is, you sit out on his backyard deck, because up there the street goes right by people’s backyards, their front yards leading downhill to the Okanagan River, which you can hear from the front porch. But sitting there shooting the shit on the backyard patio, you look over the heads of the silly houses across the street, and there it is: Big Rock Candy Mountain.

  Big Rock Candy Mountain is now not so easy to walk up to, partly because one is no longer a nimble boy but rather an oldish man who makes amusing sounds while trying to arise from an easy chair, and partly because the Indian people — or if you like to, you can cut and paste and call them First Nations people here — anyway, the Okanagan families one still knows the names of have become politicized, as we white folks would say, and you just wonder, who would I ask for permission to take a walk, even if I could walk that far, over to the foot of that sudden hump called by no one but my buddy Bob Small and me Big Rock?

  To see, you see, just what it looks like there, to see for example if there is a boulder about the size of a 1947 Pontiac (to use another kind of Indian name as a reference to thicken this narrative) that has been resting on the same spot for sixty-odd years. To check, though it is in every possible way unlikely, whether there is any hint that a human life or human and equine lives might have been suddenly stopped at that spot.

  Hey: spot. Stop. Pots. Pot being one of the names for something most of us enjoyed on that patio, or as my brother’s old pal Radicchio called it, the sunlit pawtio.

  Because anyone with a shred of brain would rule out the possibility. But then, why do parents warn you against rolling boulders down hills? Because usually, where you might do that there is a skid trail or the like, or groups of people strung out and making a better target. Or just the damned principle of the thing.

  But what if you just loved the idea of erosion and the ice age and prehistoric animal life, and, well, erosion? What if you thought about erosion when you used one piece of shale to scrape lichen from another piece of shale? What if you thought of savoury erosion when you slid back down the skid trail and walked home with sand in your shoes?

  So that Pontiac of granite hits a lip of stone and seems almost to rise as it appears like a weird planetoid in the free air before plunging and bouncing again. How fast would that giant rock be going when it landed on the couch grass floor or on tender life?

  Well, no one I knew or know has any memory of being told that someone got killed at the foot of that little mountain. But then back in the day there must have been people who died or even got killed up on the reserve, and such things never got mentioned in the Lawrence Chronicle and Inkameep Observer. If a young Indian guy got killed by a horse, you didn’t read about it in the paper, and a rock could have killed someone and you’d never hear about it unless you talked with someone who talked with someone on the reserve. There wasn’t any television in the valley back then, and the nearest radio station was in Kelowna, or Trail. There was a picture of the graduating class in the Chronicle, but no death in the hills.

  Okay, what if that Pontiac-sized boulder is there, wildflowers growing up its sides? There could be a skeleton under it. I once found a baby’s skeleton under a shale slide, or I thought I did. There could be crushed human bones under that rock. Over the course of my life since the day that huge rock flew down, I have been about half-convinced he’s there. Or she’s there? Is that worse?

  It was a summer’s day, in the month of May. It’s my favourite month, the one I sometimes get out of the hospital in.

  Some people think there were giant human beings on the earth at one time. Were they big enough to reach down and pick up that Pontiac boulder in one hand and throw it in my direction, as I deserved? Were they more giantific? Could they reach down and grasp Big Rock Candy Mountain in one hand and bowl it down the valley? Would tiny little bones under rocks matter
then? Does the notion of them matter now?

  Little episodes of guilt hide in the recesses of my mind, like bits of nicotine secreting themselves in every nook and cranny of my body. I often revisit the kitten who got the kitchen door slammed shut on its throat while I watched to see what would happen, and then my father went out toward the garage with the handful of fur. I see again that wallet that fell on the pavement under the car while the man I did not know was sticking purchases into the trunk, and I see it again on the counter of the downtown beer parlour where I left it for the bartender, saying I had found it in the men’s can. What about the two points the Kelowna Golden Owls should have got and didn’t when I was keeping score for the hometown Green Hornets, who won the game by one point in overtime?

  Was that all fiction?

  “Have you ever been up there on that little mountain?” I asked my kid brother.

  “In my dreams, every night.”

  “I believe that I have been up there for the last time,” I said.

  “I will make it a point to try to get up there when they put a tee there.”

  “Your golf cart would not have a chance,” I said.

  And we left the topic to return to matters such as the versatility of the defencemen on the Montreal Canadiens roster.

  Sometimes I worry that you will think I am just a dry-land seafarer bragging about having a port in every girl, but really, if you have to know, there is the possibility that I am making this all up. Or some of it. That is a greater possibility. Then there is another one — and okay, I am going to claim this one, again not to boast but rather something like the opposite, to calm envy and disbelief and the desire to punch me in the face. Well, there is the very distinct possibility that there were a lot more sexual adventures, infidelities, mistakes, disappointments, challenges, surprises and inevitabilities than I have the pages to commemorate or exaggerate or summarize.

  I have two friends, one alive and the other gone elemental, who like or liked to make poontang a competition of sorts. It almost always takes the following form.