One thing is for sure: you didn’t demonstrate any special tricks or unprecedented mastership. But I ‘climaxed’ already during what some call foreplay. And once more soon afterwards, which is a bit of a contradiction, but let’s not be pedantic. I was in wonderment, spiced with irritation. At the same time, that shuddering was now deep inside me and effusively demanded feeling. Which box to put it in? Where did it come from and how was it able to seize me so quickly? I thought I saw far enough to be able to trust my instruments and was immune to surprises. But now something not only pressed the buttons in me but came up with new ones too.
Wasting no time, that feeling turns into a state of countless nuances, high and low, ranging from the thrilled and the anxious to the blissfully blunt: I get to know it in detail and learn that there’s no box to put it in because there’s no space in me it hasn’t already occupied. I see it in place of what I look at, I can’t find a suitable spot for myself because I’m always somewhere else; I spend the same number of hours in front of my canvases but keep forgetting why I’m there, every now and again I find myself messing around with my paintbrush, but the patterns it leaves are childishly silly; orders come by phone, I diligently note them down, and a few hours later the piece of paper no longer exists; I promise to come to events and remember them days later, if I’m lucky; the nights are jungles of fruitless thoughts, and I spread their branches for hours in search of a little oblivion, and as soon as it comes over me I open my eyes wide and continue living where I left off, equally eagerly, the dark is dispelled by a deep vigilance, as universal as it is hysterical, but during the day it’s reduced to an easy expectation of the evening; we skip a few for fear that the constant friction will burn us, our bodies won’t allow anything else when they come close, so we take these forced breaks, insert ‘evenings off’ but go crazy from the lack, which we patch up over the telephone line, drifting half the night on the telephonic raft; during the day we call each other for silly little reasons, or without them, it’s funny how little we say to each other and prefer just to listen to one another’s breathing, it’s funny how substantial that sound in the receiver can be; I miss it as soon as I hang up, and instinct makes me check if a mail or text message has come in the meantime (as if any time had passed!), and mostly I’m not disappointed, there’s another chain of self-infatuated letters not talking about anything else, and it’s incomprehensibly hard to exist outside them, to find the calm for any other activity; everything else sounds incomplete, ignoble, indecent.
At the same time, it covers me like a capsule impenetrable to the eyes of others and impervious to atmospheric events. Father’s suffering now just glides along amiably beside it.
You’re inside it too, occupying the whole space before I realise; if anything coherent can be squeezed in, it’s as dialogue: I have to explain to you and discuss with you whatever goes through my mind, to ask your opinion, even if it’s just about a choice of teaspoon; my eyes now serve exclusively for searching for things worth sharing with the you in me.
But when we’re together, it’s hard to arrive at words we haven’t already shared through our touches and gazes, or purely through our closeness. That’s a bit scary, but there’s no time for far-sighted fear or anything less immediate than embraces. Besides, it feels so much more real and satisfying to be cloned–that togetherness in everything conceivable.
Of all the tenses, only the present is left. I don’t know which of us suggested it, or if we broached the issue at all, but we both wholeheartedly agreed to an embargo on whatever was before, an agreement of silence about the past. What good could it do us? I know too much about my own and will happily give it away to the first bidder; I want you here and now, without a single bit stuck in other dimensions. How pretentious, how childish, to expect that we would purge ourselves of everything which prevents us from reinventing ourselves from zero and tailoring ourselves to a totally new measure. But whatever knowledge we’ve gathered so far is of no use–there’s no room for anything except immoderate expectations and childlike wishes.
From evening to evening is an ocean-wide gap–plus there are those we bravely miss out to cultivate yearning–and the days are like a dive with my breath held. When it’s time to come up for air, nothing can hold me down: I happily take the tram out to the terminus, then three stops with the bus through the outskirts. And as soon as I get out and am on the footpath I feel well enough to want to stay, I don’t need to take a single step more towards happiness because it’s already immersed me from inside, I float along on it, saunter and give it time to settle; I’ve felt at home in this neighbourhood from the very beginning, as if I grew up here. In just a few days I grew propellers and roots, acquired an earthing in my own body, so that my body and the other twelve grams feel they belong here. And I’m hardly heavier on my legs as they carry me to your house, perfectly camouflaged in the emulsion of suburban stagnation among hundreds of other equally shabby houses. There is nothing here to comfort the eye, let alone shape the desire for earthly duration, for putting out the tentacles of one’s family; yet so many have dug themselves in. They tie themselves to a clod of soil to call their own as evidence of their human self and its prosthetic devices, animal, vegetable and material, which they’ve crammed into their courtyards to adorn the plots of their existence, and how right they are to do so: it’s the culmination of wisdom to stir up one’s tribal instinct, to nourish it with durable foundations and daylong pursuits, with gardens and kindergartens, or at least balcony-based evocations of Paradise, to enclose one’s biotope and colonise it with human hubbub; all that is perfectly comprehensible and compelling, in fact it’s the only way; and it’s with that inside me that I ring your doorbell every time.
And then it disappears as soon as I’m through the threshold, it’s like I’m in a submarine, a craft undetectable by earthly radar; your hands erase the outer world. How can you say they’re no good at anything in particular, how else can my every thought be transformed into the desire for you to touch me? It intercepts and grounds our attempts to fill the space between us with words, to see what fuses us together in verbal contour and at the same time maintain the air between us with words; we can’t live for more than a few seconds if we’re an arm’s length apart; already we’re in under each other’s T-shirts, each other’s palate and all the arches of our physical existence. For the life of me I don’t know why I go faint so ardently beneath those hands, but it’s blindingly easy to follow the way they shape me with their touch, the way my contours emerge from the sweat we pour on one another. We wring each other down to the last drop and afterwards we still have more; the nights are getting hotter and we pour yet more heat into ourselves, but wine has no particular part to play in this, the wine in the pauses is only a brief distraction from our serious stupor; the sheets beneath us are drunk, flooded again and again by our fluids, all crumpled, then smoothed out only to be creased and kneaded once more, my whole body craves again for that kneading as soon as our raging rivers subside, I need your hands everywhere and ever deeper, and your lips which you immerse in me; you always meet me with that wet smile and a tenderness which turns me to water and begins to control my movements already at the doorstep, I have to press myself up to it straight away with my breasts and belly and thighs, I bury my face in your skin, and immediately we fall into a bewilderment, where everything is interlocked, stirred up and fuses in the same impassable, pulsating second; a hundred times the same, simultaneously, we press crotch to crotch, chest to chest, I rub my breasts against your bare back, your belly, they stay in your mouth to the edge of unconsciousness, and you in mine, hot, smooth, supple and slippery; you slide easily down every valley, the channels are velvety and moist, full to bursting with delight which has to be flung from my throat with a scream; I want to suck all of you in through my throat, fill my lungs with you and seal them, and it feels you’ll melt me with your lips, every last bit of me will flow into your mouth, and we’ll be wedged in each other so inseparably that we’ll
have to be smelted down; you’ll finish me off with powerful thrusts, my groin will burst and all the threads in me snap, my heart will rush out through my forehead, I’ll just gasp my dying breath, and I won’t care. Yet I dread how things will be afterwards, how to walk the earth after that, how to repeat it, or at least come close to it, but this fear is needless because even before the sweat has cooled from our skin we’re there again, equally hungry.
* * *
That light bulb had long since given up the ghost like all the other similar things I’ve neither fixed nor removed: I consummate my acceptance of the situation by ever more skilfully avoiding them with my gaze. The next evening is awash with the flux and tide of uncertainty as to whether you’ll say I’m sorry, those were a few seconds of foolishness, you know the rest yourself: what happened was all just in your imagination. Finally I more or less steel myself for the blow; I pick up the phone, type in your number, hear the first ring, and suddenly the light bulb comes alive and dazzles me with a blinding beam of light, like a spotlight from above.
The bulb hadn’t gone, it had just lost contact. And of all moments, it chose that one to reconnect. Quite a trifle, really, with no value outside the context, but in cooperation with the rest–a Messianic annunciation. It began with the realisation that we were born on the same day, of all days in the history of humankind. That already holds enough seismic potential of its own, rousing me wide awake and demanding serious meditation, but it produces nothing of benefit, nothing applicable, more just fear and trembling at the sense that what I have in my hands is finer than a spider’s thread and at once more precious to me than my own birth, and sent down to earth in only one single copy.
Discussing our favourite books, films and music confirms, if there was any room for doubt, that we’ve lived in telepathic twinship without knowing it and have together created the archetypal match-making TV show; a fiction about love a la carte; it was our overlapping which inspired the fantasy about entrusting one’s partner-search to a well-informed agency with a global database of potential candidates. It’s almost funny how many crucial pointers, bases and sources both of us have visited on our separate orbits, how many similar traces have been impressed into us, how many identical interpretations, feelings and landscapes of the senses… What congeniality our destinies have blindly concocted in these two vessels!
It’s not easy to live with that because the thrill of discovery gradually turns into a search for something we can’t hear and, being silent, we can’t know in advance. Being so close that there’s no need to seal up the gaps between us is certainly satisfying, but it distances us from everything in the external world. Starry-eyed at so much inner beauty, we’re imprisoned in that vacuum. In the air, the flowering chestnuts of May are replaced by the fragrant lindens of June, and still our mutual enchantment lets nothing else into our field of vision, no step out among the mortals. I live for the moment when the doorbell rings and whatever has called me during the day and assured me of its existence dissipates when I see you at the doorstep.
And the same scenario is repeated. We fall into one another, into oblivion, revolving in a vortex of vertigo. It’s even a little reminiscent of a turntable and the stylus in its groove–it has no sense of duration, all that happens is circular; we copy out page after page of the same moment, one over the other. The only trace of time are your cigarette butts which fill up the ashtray; your lighter is in your hands as soon as you take them off me; that sight is at once like a hand placed on my shoulder by a different time, but it’s enough to shake it off for it to disappear; when you go I send a draught of fresh air through the whole mélange, ashes are returned to ashes, yet the veils of smoke in the air keep you for several hours longer, and then I hold my breath until the next evening, which we’ll again set on fire.
The material world between us is now only still embodied in wine. For lack of oenological education, in the supermarket I let onomastics decide: I bow to nominative determinism and take a bottle of Macedonian red with the label T’ga za jug–Longing for the South–and the move turns out to be so fruitful that we never even think of changing or experimenting with variations; a bottle of this brand, filled with the optimum blend of longing and the south, a formula which ferments in us into all-evening euphoria, gives the south wings on which to flutter here and lends longing an aesthetic, epic dimension; not a single evening reaches the end without us extracting the soul of the genie in the bottle.
But the shelf-life of oblivion and the ignoring of the past is limited. The less alluring face of longing returns too, that countenance which no one would take off the shelf or invite on an endless summer holiday, but there you have it, far-thinking God included it among the prizes to create a little suspense and give the true long-term winners a chance to stand out. Whatever I feel when I see you, however certain I am that this is our common truth and with however much desire you show me that it will never ever be different, I start having bouts of what I call longing just so as to cover up the Unnameable. It strikes root and gains ground, at first only in solitude but soon also when we’re together.
I hide, but it becomes ever harder. In those moments, which grow to swallow up ever greater slices of the day and cut to the last credible explanation, I gasp for words on the phone like a fish on dry land, and I put an end to my anguish by inventing things I desperately need to do just then. When we meet, I respond to your increasingly questioning looks with whatever pretexts are at hand: insomnia, stress or headaches. But each masquerade works only once, and the guise is already crumbling. Reflections of the Unnameable settle flake by flake on your worried face, amidst nervousness and anxiety. I watch this from the inside, and I would scream, I would let myself be crucified, if only it would stop; but I do nothing.
The chemistry and mechanics of the body never fail. As soon as I touch you I’m reduced to prehistoric instinct. A vitality seethes up within me, seeking release, wanting to fill you everywhere like fingers in a glove, to dig into your skin in a frenzied thirst for your smells and tastes, and I can’t get enough. Although I search you with my tongue from your mouth to your toes and the depths of every concavity, I can hardly taste a hint of humanity. As if you weren’t a warm-blooded being and your molecules in no way tainted with flesh, and your elevation into the ether is so effective that it almost evokes a nostalgia for something animalistic, or at least savage, but in vain, it’s inconceivable, nothing less tender than tenderness can flow between us, not even in thought.
And every time that leads to what I sensed at the very beginning and what soon emerged in full glory to petrify my gaze: that I can only watch as everything precious I take into my hand shrivels before my eyes, that your burning, all-embracing closeness won’t be able to bridge the gap which separates us, and that not one bold launch towards fusion will prevent us from becoming mere objects for one another again. That’s how it is, although there’s nothing on you I don’t love, and although every little piece of your being is still equally alive in me today, tangible in its plenitude and untouched over time: if I move one little stone I’m buried by an avalanche of the others.
That butt-end of a smile you greet me with, without words, your head just leaning towards your shoulder, a slight twitch of your lips… Your eyes for an instant deep in mine, dark and piercing, with an insatiable glimmer… The thought which first flashes across your face and only then, painstakingly weighed up, crystallises in the air, shallow reefs and shoals… There are hundreds more which don’t come beyond your mouth, except as sighs or pouting like an angry duck. The shrill voice which escapes your mouth at the end of the sentence like the aliquot tone of a musical instrument… The ait of fine downy hairs beneath your ear… A traverse streak on your nose when you’re tired… Your calves outstretched across my belly, and I caressing them… So much joy beneath my fingers that I choke on tears, feeling that eternity is sneering at me, and I only stare at it through a sheath of ice, I don’t know what else to do.
It’s similar outside th
e cocoon, too. While we sit in the theatre, our fingers intertwined, my hand roams all your accessible places, I explore down your neck into your unbuttoned blouse; the woman on the stage beats the air with her fists and crawls on all fours with her veins almost bursting–on the whole it’s not so irritating that someone would get up and walk out–but my only thought is the time wasted when I’m not looking at you. In the bar afterwards your beauty is so sparkling and so deafening that I feel like going from table to table and asking the visitors to forgive you for it making them feel ugly in comparison, but they don’t hear because they’re busy talking. Yet I don’t say a word to you about this, I keep it all inside.
The evening social do–how absolutely spiffing! The participants include contemporaries endowed with canonical sway, lucid insights into the functioning of the world and a gift for its humoristic recycling, even with unadulterated charm. Some seem happily replete with their own ego, in euphony with the environment and embraced by the fulsome resonance of their own words. And me? I take delight in comparativist ping-pong, after you I start to see a buffoon in everyone, about one fifth the size they believe themselves to be, with a wind-up key on their backs, engrossed in the gross bubbles they blow with their spit.
At your joint exhibition together with three other artists I feel I’ve come loose from the floor and am budding with pride because their attempt to drag you back to earth and break you down to their size is so ridiculously unsuccessful; disproportion is the main event of the evening, even for someone artistically illiterate like me it’s as clear as day that only your paintings have that inner glow, and in your eyes there’s a glow for me only, it flashes with anticipation that we’ll rush home to my place and let rip, with the whole evening ahead of us; we’ve brought quite a drunkenness with us but still open another bottle of Longing, and a bag of laughter in ourselves; everything revolves with us in the heat which unceasingly pushes back the borders of the possible, the air itself is pure fire, and we laugh in its face, rub body against body until the last bridges are burnt, and with them the very idea of returning to humanity.
A Handful of Sand Page 18