With nothing to look at but the sofa, Junior began to squirm and fuss. Dylan took him, held him aloft and tapped his head on the ceiling. In three seconds flat, he was laughing. All babies are bipolar.
“We could meet some people though,” Dylan said. “There must be plenty of nice people there.” He lowered the baby again and kissed his scabby belly button.
“There are nice people everywhere,” Erin said.
Dylan surfaced. “Hawaii strikes me as being kind of special though. Like I imagine people there must be extra nice.”
Erin screwed up her face. “What’s gotten into you? I don’t ever remember you mentioning Hawaii before. Now suddenly you want to live there?”
“I’m just thinking aloud.”
“‘Fantasizing’ is more like it.”
“That may be,” he said. “That may very well be.”
• • •
In the absence of Wendy’s body, Dylan spent the week attempting to get intimate with her mind by reading up on Mormonism whenever he got a spare moment between classes. It was harder than he’d expected. For instance, he failed to suspend enough disbelief to accept that their central prophet and founder, Joseph Smith, an avowed treasure-seeker and scryer, had, at the behest of the angel Moroni, dug up gold plates in Western New York circa the 1820s and translated them with the help of stone-lensed spectacles. The story was weird enough that Dylan almost wanted to believe it, but at the very least he’d have to inspect the plates, and conveniently enough Smith claimed to have promptly returned them to the angel upon translating them. Neither did Dylan much respect Mormons’ unbelievably racist founding myth. But the crazy, beautiful stuff—Kolob, spirit babies, the multiverse33 and all the psychedelic rest of it—this stuff he could get behind, at least in the spirit of poetry. And however different Mormonism was from Catholicism, it felt good to revisit the rhetoric of people who believed, truly believed, in ultimate Meaning and Goodness and Love. It made him feel, for as long as he let it, like a kid again, swinging his legs in a pew, absorbing all those magical words spoken by the adults who knew everything there was to know and then some. It wasn’t hard, in retrospect, to see why Jesus liked kids the best: Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.
33_____________
“We can come to no other conclusion, but that worlds, and systems of worlds, and universes of worlds existed in the boundless heights and depths of immensity…” –Orson Pratt, original member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, in a pamphlet entitled “Great First Cause,” 1851.
Always game for a pun, Dylan recognized how fitting it was that he should be thinking about suffering little children even as his students went about mounting their Shakespeare scenes. The grading rubric included categories for memorization, voice and articulation, believability, physical movement and blocking, and overall performance. Most students were doing C work; it was as if they were determined to prove that the bard (not to mention poetry and drama in general) was beneath them and their transhuman lives.
Daniel Young, his broken English notwithstanding, gave one of the more heartfelt performances, though it was clear he was playing as much to Dylan as to his beloved Hermia. Dylan gave him a rather generous B. On hearing this after class, Daniel hung his head and shuffled away.
• • •
Come Sunday, Dylan was at the spaceport again. Wendy was more appropriately dressed this time: no scarf, no jacket, no boots, just an orange T-shirt, blue jeans, brown sandals, a small travel bag—and the customary toad on her head. Dylan swiped the door, reached out a hand and abducted her from the curb. “I hope you don’t mind my not getting out,” he said. “I thought we should spend as much time as possible out of the public eye. Gather our rosebuds while we may.”
“I missed you too,” she said.
As soon as her succulent buttocks hit the seat, he kissed her sheltering lips and audibly purred.
“To Ascension Forest,” he ordered the driver.
“Who’s at the wheel today?” Wendy asked.
“John Coltrane, for the moment. That okay by you?”
“Great. I love jazz.”
“Mr. Coltrane’s about to do a live rendition of A Love Supreme for us, I believe. Isn’t that right, Johnny?”
“One of my all-time favorites,” Wendy said. That was lucky.
“Cool,” Coltrane said. And some invisible bassist launched right into it.
Dylan had done the first leg of the trip singing along with Ted Neeley, the original Jesus of Jesus Christ Superstar, at the wheel. He’d been thinking of Wendy when he made the request, but then it dawned on him that this unsubtle Messiah might cramp his style (not to mention make him think of Erin). Coltrane, however—even in this hieratic mode, his searching tenor was an aphrodisiac. By the time they arrived at the forest, Dylan’s tongue had licked every exposed cell of Wendy’s face, neck, and breasts. Her nipples were so hard, he was afraid he might cut his tongue.
“I hope you enjoy your time in Ascension Forest,” Coltrane said.
“Oh, don’t you worry about that,” Dylan said. “We’ll see you in a few hours.” Then he swiped the door, and the two lovers hied hand-in-hand to the moss.
“You know,” Dylan said. “I forgot to ask you last time about your religious reasons for keeping a toad.”
“Oh, right. You’ll probably find it weird, but Cane serves as a reminder for me.”
“A reminder of what, may I ask?”
“I’m not sure how much you know about Mormonism…”
“A bit.”
“Then you know that our religion was founded when the angel Moroni delivered God’s revelation to Joseph Smith on some gold plates in upstate New York?”
“I’d heard something like that, yes.”
“Well, what you don’t always hear is that while Joseph was digging up the box that contained those plates, he was greeted by an enormous toad, which, depending on the account, either morphed into a man who proceeded to beat the crap out of him, or a flaming monster with glittering eyes. Either way, it’s a manifestation of the angel.”
Dylan squinted skeptically at Cane, who looked like a cow pie with eyes.
“And what is it you want to be reminded of exactly?” Dylan asked.
“That sometimes what seems to us like evil is really just a kind of treasure guardian. That our suffering isn’t wasted, in other words. I suffered a lot while I waited for you, you know.”
This answer struck him as both totally crazy and more than a little wise.
“I’ve had this ache in my chest all week,” Dylan complained.
“I’m familiar with that ache,” she said.
“On the upside,” Dylan said, “I have never felt the power of poetry as deeply as I did this week, and I’ve been teaching pretty much the same poems for years.”
“Lay one on me.”
“You want to hear a poem?”
“Show me a girl who doesn’t want to hear a poem from her lover and I will show you the beginning of the end of our species.”
Dylan was glad to hear her call him her “lover” despite their couple of near misses so far. Moreover, it relieved him of any doubt as to which poem he would recite to her. Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” had been coursing through his head with renewed life since he’d read it aloud in class on Tuesday. In its entirety, it was probably too direct for the occasion, too on-the-nose and almost-raunchy, so he gave her just the final, inspired stanza:
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than lan
guish in his slow-chapt power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Wendy’s eyes had gone all anime. “You’re a romantic,” she said.
“Actually,” he corrected her, “Andrew Marvell is considered a metaphysical poet.”
By now they had arrived at the edge of the moss, that threshold between the (relatively) ordinary world and the ecstatic one they’d be a part of in a moment. They unpeeled some tendrils and kicked off their shoes. Wendy righted one of hers and gently placed Cane in it.
Dylan made a suggestion: “What do you say we take off all our clothes this time?” Even if they couldn’t make love like proper lovers, they could at least enjoy each other’s warm-blooded bodies to some frustrating degree.
“Okay,” she said.
“Really?”
“You go first.”
“Much obliged.”
So he began, and she proceeded to match him article for article until they were both au naturel. She was pretty and pink-brown and in far better shape than he was. Ye Gods! Annihilate but space and time, and make two lovers happy.
He held out his hand. “Ready?”
She smiled impishly and took the hand. They swung their arms, counted down from three, and leapt.
And the flora met them halfway. In a matter of seconds, Wendy lay supine on the moss bed, squirming and delirious, and Dylan watched as the forest insinuated itself into each of her available orifices. No one had ever accused Ascension Forest of subtlety.
Dylan, for his part, had fallen to his knees and the vines were having their way with him too. A couple of tendrils had crept around his waist from the back and were massaging his scrotum; another had wrapped around his penis and tightened like a spring; yet another was shimmying, not ungently, up his asshole.
All of which was pleasant enough, though it was frustrating too. He and Erin used to let these plants simply complement their lovemaking; the idea that he and his inamorata were going to fuck the forest but not each other was rather hard for his machismo to digest.
By now Wendy had done a little crunch, grabbed hold of the liverwort nearest her clit and begun giving it some tutoring. Evidently this lusty superorganism of a forest wasn’t quite making the grade, and if that wasn’t Dylan’s cue for an intervention, then nothing would ever be.
He walked on his knees until his shadow consumed her. “Allow me,” he said, and he began to peel away all the relevant vines.
She grabbed his shoulder and gave it a shove. “Dylan, please. We’ve discussed this. Just watch.”
He backed off and did her bidding, watching, merely watching, as the vines re-insinuated themselves and her smile distorted, her eyes narrowed, her breath quickened. He watched her, yes, but he also watched her watching him, and he watched her watching him watching her, and the feedback loop grew so impossibly complex so fast that it was difficult to feel they were in any meaningful sense separate entities anymore. The object and yourself must become one, and from that feeling of oneness issues your poetry.
So he approached her again and finished the job of peeling away the vines.
She cocked her head, his coy mistress: “No, Dylan.”
But some force of nature was pulling him toward her, into her, and resisting it did not seem to be an option.
He drank the sweat from her neck.
“Dylan, don’t.”
This force was every bit as fundamental as gravity or electromagnetism. Maybe it was love, or poetry, or just the procreative instinct. In any case, he was powerless to fight it. He grabbed each of Wendy’s slick, sinewy thighs and pulled her body toward his…and then all at once her eyes turned to ice and his gaze slipped off.
“Coy” was too generous a word. His mistress was frigid.
He put down her legs and backed away. He was eager, yes, but he was not a rapist, and he didn’t seem to have any choice about that either. Maybe if he’d been abused as a kid or something, he could do it, but he hadn’t, and he couldn’t.
“How can you possibly be serious?” he complained. “Do you really expect me to just jerk off again? After all we’ve been through?”
She leered, but not in the sexy way.
“I mean I get your whacko religion and all,” he continued, “but do you really think God’s going to split hairs like this? Aren’t we basically guilty already? You’re the one who said ‘All or nothing at all.’”
“I never said that.”
“Didn’t you?”
“That was Sinatra.”
“A technicality.”
“I suppose you’re Andrew Marvell then?”
“You better believe I am. I’ll tear ‘thorough the iron gates of life’ the second you give me the go-ahead.”
She shut her eyes. He shook his head and swatted at some nettlesome moss.
When she opened her eyes, it was clear she’d found something back there behind her lids. “Dylan?”
“Wendy?”
“Are you John Coltrane too?”
“Sure.”
“I mean, do you understand now that what we have here truly is a love supreme?”
“I think I do, yes.”
“So if I give you the most precious gift I have to give, will you make me a promise?”
“Anything.”
“I mean it. An honest-to-God covenant.”
“I mean it too. Anything.”
She took a deep breath. “All right then. I want you to leave your family for me. If you promise me you’ll leave them, I will let you do anything you want with me for all eternity.”
And there it was, as naked as their bodies.
He couldn’t act surprised exactly. This had to arise sooner or later; she’d already declared him her future husband after all. But still, how conniving! Had this been her plan all along? To get him all hot and bothered and then either blackmail or blueball him? To turn this bed of moss into a bargaining table? How reprehensible! But also: how sexy! It had been a long time since anyone had made him feel so desirable.
Clearly he needed to cool off, to walk away, to clear the pipes himself and then consider all that had transpired in the cool light of reason.
But then wasn’t that the mistake he’d always made? Hadn’t he decided just last week that reason was overrated? That, in the end, a cool light didn’t make for much of a guiding one? Wasn’t passion the thing so sorely missing from his life? And wasn’t that precisely what was on offer here?
These, then, from his current—naked, throbbing—vantage point, were his options: either he could embrace: a) reason, predictability, and death, or b) passion, adventure, and life. An fMRI, of course, would show that his neurons had made this monumental decision seconds, if not minutes, ago. The take-home lesson of brain science was simply to relax; which was not to say you were free to do so if it wasn’t in the cards, but for Dylan in this moment, it did seem to be in the cards. “Okay,” he said.
Wendy went all lips and teeth and lips. He scooted forward, placed her dirty feet on his shoulders and fit the head of his cock to her nether lips, which, truth in advertising, were about as thick as her mouth ones. She held him at bay by a single shoulder.
“You promise?”
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” he said.
“Then come on in,” she said, letting go of the shoulder, and he plunged toward the celestial heaven inside of her and for a split second all was Meaning and Goodness and Love...
But then that split second passed and Dylan understood that sex with Wendy wasn’t going to be anything very special after all. What’s more, she was going to bleed all over his peni
s, which, as far as he was concerned, was more turn-off than -on.
How was it that he kept falling into this trap of believing that sex might confer some sort of immortality on him? That the impassioned movement of bodies in space might have some bearing on their movement in time? Granted, Einstein, relativity, etc., but that didn’t seem to be what he meant; he seemed to mean something more along the lines of magic.
Not that he wasn’t enjoying this—it was nice—but it was all just a matter of so many nerve endings and the release of pent-up urges, and it was as clear as bankruptcy that he would no more find magic in this than he would in, say, urination.
Anyway, he pulled out and came in her mouth. She swallowed.
In the smoldering afterglow, Dylan lay on his back, legs crossed at the ankles, staring up at the boughs of the sentient trees while the moss massaged him toward what might have been sleep were he not so wound up. Wendy’s heavy head lay on his chest and he stroked her sweaty hair.
“I’m so happy,” she said.
She did seem to be.
“I waited so long,” she said.
She had.
“My celestial husband! My love supreme!”
Good God, what had he agreed to? If he’d had a laser-juicer handy, he’d have taken it to his nutsack then and there.
She glanced up at him and smiled wide, her lips huge and dark and forever.
“Let’s sleep awhile,” she suggested.
“I’ll need to go soon.”
“Why?”
“Erin will be expecting me.”
“Forget about Erin. You’re mine now.”
“Still, I’ll need a little time to work things out.”
“How much time?”
“I don’t know. Weeks. I have a certain responsibility. I don’t want my family to be hurt unnecessarily.”
“Why not? It’s not as if you love them.”
Dylan quit the perfunctory stroking and propped himself up on his elbows. “Why would you say such a thing?”
“You don’t even kiss Junior good night.”
“I do too.”
“Okay, well not every night.”
“And how would you know that?”
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