Her ass having tightened, but not the jerking and as-if-hysterically-giggling cunt (but with the ass tightened, the cunt is tightened somewhat), I am partially content, contented, while being left in a state of somewhat mysterious dissatisfaction. She shields her face: she suspects me of extreme violence—so did my mother and sister.
I proceed secretively—an adolescent, more than an adolescent . . .
“You’re more beautiful as a woman than I am, Wiley,” she whispers.
I hate to talk when I am near coming. I want to observe this thing.
Still, I say to her: “Fuck-talk butters no parsnips, as my mother said.” I push her farther onto the bed—I feel guilty—and I lie on top of her—on all of her (as she did on me in her sleep: a sexual anecdote)—in a sort of sexually romantic silence in which I feel the arterial pulse of the fineness of the sexual courtesies, if that is what they are, and not idiocies, or sensual gaucheries, as an alliance and a fixity of residual loneliness only to this extent and which she cannot resolve and in which I bridge my shadowiness unfinally with the diffused white glare of the sensations near orgasm. She and I bodily, and as if cuntedly—both of us—and both of us phallic—are uttering a maybe fine-enough soliloquy (for us) as if it were a speech in a dialogue or as if we were speaking to each other, but it is only me; she is carrying me aloft . . . Pegasus . . . Bucephalus, in night penury, real beggary. Someone has made us, me, adventurously rich—
But I am already too old for a story in which the beggar, all at once, plans to steal and rule the world. But it was recognizably love-of-a-kind that I felt. The reason for not talking is that it draws the attention away. If you focus, you still are surrounded by shadows—and haunted by a lot of shit . . . The young man’s sweaty face is against her. His back is sweaty and his butt and his legs as he goes on plugging away, moving scramblingly up a slope of exploding magnesium-flaring, white, glarelike bursts of sensation. Here is a sanctity of contract and a humility foreign to law. Earlier conceit is insulted here. Beggary and penury are attached to getting to orgasm. It is a kinship to light—this simplicity of unattached and penniless being. This residual and present thing. I start to grunt—very softly.
“Go ahead . . . Do what you like,” she says as she said earlier.
The buttock sweeps and the ass-swoops and the flesh pausing for the light, and so one can listen, and the lurching rhythms, dreadful, foolish, at the edge of orgasm, effectual gatheringly for no clear reason—and the listening—in loneliness, the loneliness was intruded upon (unwisely) by Ora’s breath—it veiled the lucubrations of the as-if-too-conscious or brainy obelisk—I rose up on my braced hands. The fluid grace of sensation shifts oddly—intelligently—as if in speech: a remarkable capacity: this-for-this love-speech, the now meager muscular shuffle—a shift of rhetoric—in recognition of the dominance of elicited feeling, too imperial to be ignored, suffocating any counterfeit blather, but axiomatic, unarguable in some ordinary and yet exotic and bossy way. The grating pleasure of the second time. The emptied and instructed wish for presence survives the moment-of-silence.
Then it weakens in the democratic rush of fragments, portions of the soul and body in pre-orgasm, a flash of more than private value. I resist. I stiffen. One tries to preserve the walls—the old sense of things. She does that, too. I grow giddily cold. And burned at the edges high in some stratosphere. Ora did not follow me here. And when she breathed, it intruded. It distracted me. Me, in my self-change; she offered herself as a tail for me in my self-change in the amphibious moment—a dawn thing, dawn transportation . . . absurdly immense and unreal, artificial, inner light is a pivoting within a peculiar cowardice: one is on top—is up there—but one is upended, bleeding light—one is bleeding with light—heartlessly. The second silence is very large—is full of dismissal—I am very young. The slide and glop of Ora’s companionship—her presence—and a potency of sexual-hallucinatory-neural-quicksilver-milk, milky stuff at the end of the world in an informative spasm. Alliance, complicity. Patience with the airy space of moonish-mindlight: one has no need of gender now. The mid-body, which is literally full of shit and which has its courage and its odor—now a bright, awful stench—sweatily convulses with physical emanations of the odd, inner, tremendous, and shuddering and sailing-off, or shattering light, in what I suppose is the pagan caliber of the moment. Love such as it was with us . . . “Ora, tighten on me . . . “She didn’t, though. Perhaps I didn’t speak it out loud. Unmoored. Unrooted. The orphan at genesis feels breath, silence, the turnings inward coerced by the welling spasm, the weird foreshivers of the crotch-wing; the not-quite-pigeon-body prick throbs. Then the repetitive flight and explosion, marvelously hot, shapeless, ungrasping, the dismasted weird uncurtaining in terms of light and heated quicksilver milk as an explanation of the beginning of the world. “Go ahead,” she whispers as in the fuck before this one. The sexual event brought me here. An orbital and veering solar heat, a partly emptied, largely unemptied solar expenditure in lunar light among linked shadows forming signs in spasms of linked, extraordinarily piercing, piercingly wonderful comprehensibilities—not comprehensible in language. See, I told you, the wicked self whispers. See what is here? Everyone knows about this. But differently. Knows differently. My heart’s rhythm was like a goose cackle, a rhythmic thing, in the labor of the second spasm among the scary whirr of nerves and the contractions and puckers of muscles and electric and chemical horse-whinnies inside oneself, oddly—more or less laughably here—then the phallic shovel unearths quicksilver and throws it in some sort of lateral and downward and yet upward and prayerful fountainingness, and well, the flesh is drenched in it and jerks squirtingly into phosphorescence, neurally aflame, indescribably present—the clench and pound and the being pried open for the hemorrhage of light, the eerily delighted fatality of the spurting. Spurting hot quicksilver light irreversibly. I am young. I am with her. On her. In her. It is not a symbol, this giddy-gaudy, good, goody-goody American stuff. The truce between good-looking murderers. This sweat on the cheeks of my face . . . and on my buttocks . . . I AM NOT DEAD IN THIS LIGHT . . . It isn’t her flesh that I do this for, but it is with its help that I do it. The third spasm, rockingly silver, pumps and swings back and forth, tearingly existent in me . . . Hi . . . Ah . . . Ora said once (upon a time), What can you do to me, Wiley? I’m not a virgin, I’m an unhappy young woman . . . Let’s live together . . . So we did. In the real world as opposed to the drawn world in a story, assuming I could write one, I cannot ask her anything really truthful about this stuff, since she does not know these inmost terms. She said in her flesh, I am used to cold guys . . . male selfishness at orgasm. This weight of lunacy . . . The fourth spasm is weak. It is accompanied by slyness—an impudent daring—the insolence of conscious half-emergence, of hope. Now I notice that she coos a little . . . This pretty mindlessness . . . Love, a comedy . . . Some sense of that in her. My apish buffoonery—murderous. I see the healthily pale, dramatically boned face, dark-eyed, colossally present below me. Ora has said, You were never SERIOUSLY hurt, Wiley. Carelessly, filthily, resigned-to-being-sneered-at, one is brave—and experienced in tonight’s orgasm—and one rides its subsiding—this stuff as happiness—uh uh uh . . .—and is more and more aware. One exits, one enters through veils of fading event. Her body watched me. It’s loony—the undry, not austere not-turning-away THING of a pretty body if the person is interested in you, death, genius really, fluttering on the flagpole. The lash-inflected small poem of eyes erotically unpromising now: reality. I am here among a separate order of meanings in a field of her breath.
I am in her arms. I am in her, shakingly still. The vein in the prick trembles. ORA’S eyes are unfocussed, giving me privacy. I alight more steadily. She focusses and whispers—senselessly—“Stop noticing things.” Then: “I’m here . . . Go ahead . . .”
“YOU’RE NICE!” the young man says fatuously. “I’m done.” I thought she could tell.
Her mouth: the murderously ad hoc absolution of its expression—beauty, crim
inality, and forgiveness—I understand certain movies now. She has a large soul—it is awing and jolting to share your life again, to live in this, the only world.
May I go on?
I lie here, softening in her, occasionally achingly restiffening in less wonder and dryingly—so to speak—with quick shoves, or strokes, of recent memory of parts of the hallucinatory sacrament, the addictive ‘innocence’ of hallucination.
I said, “Thanks, honey.”
After a while, she said, “You will hurt me someday, Wiley.”
“Physically? Mentally?” Then, before she could answer, I said, “Let’s not talk—it’s so late . . .”
“I am not talking,” she said in her maddening-refusal-of-all-coercion way. “This isn’t real talk.” Then: “You’re not as innocent as you think you are.”
I said to her, “I think we’ll go on together a little bit longer, huh?”
She said nothing. But some flexure of her body—her odor—spoke. It produced her and her body’s definition of me in terms of her body’s sense of the moment.
“Don’t look at us, Wiley,” she whispered.
I said, “Ora, am I hateful?”
“No,” she said.
“Am I heartless?”
“I can live with it.” She said, “That was a purple one, a royal one, Wiley . . .”
And it was over.
The Moments As They Follow
THE MOMENTS DO FOLLOW—the moments—a line of elephants, of rooms, of the cars of a railroad train as vast as the universe, an invisible but palpable train of an all materializing and vanishing, the great hidden railroad of time—ha-ha—and, if something is around it, part of an all that includes the train—dark or lighted air, a landscape of a wholly other sort—then that, too, stirs in the passage of time . . . In the following moments—in the line of childlike exfoliations of chambered now’s—one breathes—and perhaps, in the actions—fluxions—articulations of subsidence—of nerves, of blood—in the slow wonder of waking from the sexual event, one finds oneself on this strange planet of The Afterwards, place of Naked Cannibal Moments—in which, maybe to my horror, familiarity stirs: every morning is echoed here, wakefulness, waking . . . Ulysses blundering through the surf of the island toward the shore—a hobo jumping from a freight car—the innocent and dawnlike pallor of objects, dimly outlined by the distant light that keeps our window from being dark as it would be in the country on a moonless night—what is one to do next? What is this afterwards? Is this truer than before? The extent to which moments differ is a mark of reality. Why isn’t every moment largely the same? Feelings here are attenuated and dry—a little—and some odd, somewhat aboriginal tribunal is sitting here—naked elders in the pretty and yet grim afterlight, in immediate sexual memory—ah, oh, uh, ah, the light! the light! SUSPICIOUS OF LOVE—OF LIFE, for that matter—restless as if in the holy and secular procession of the moments, or no, the ritual and casual and relentless and capricious procedures of the moments as they were in their courses of existence, near-existence in this direction and in that—nearing me, the nodule becoming the slow breath of a wing of a nervous recognition of the immense and infinite and petty procedures—in which my skin proceeded—a sewn kayak thing in this eerie, as if bubbling, goading, tickling current—this everywhere current going in the utterly inspired, inspiring direction of my death, in the direction of the death of everything, the moment with its somewhat treacherously snakelike heading toward a ferociously harsh, apocalyptic meaning—the moment! I am goaded and borne, pushed and touched everywhere, occupied and racked by a mere sense of the moment, submerged in that sense, filled with different orders of it—a committee of dashingly different orders of senses of passing time—I am drowning in reality; I choke dryly on my airlessness even while I breathe directly after the odd, semi-hallucinatory seconds of orgasm; I choke in an inward despair at being real, us being real—it is like being born—into my life: this being my life: one is entangled with this and that nursing procedure—to be close to Ora, this was like wearing or having a skin that is mine now—tattooed? Well, shaped. I would never succeed in entirely removing these moments—a costume I felt and never saw.
I lit a cigarette (back then in the 1950s) and, in the restless currents of meaning, substituted actual motion. I got up and said, “Got to piss,” and I went, naked as I was, through the shadows into the small bathroom, above Sixty-eighth Street, the lights, the late night below, the whalelike rush of something, a truck, a van. The acerbic smoke, the cold tile, the faintly slide-y bathroom rug mean that I am here—in this order of factuality—and I pause, in the shadows: I am thin-bodied still, not as thin as at birth or when I was fourteen, but thin: the line of connection is recognizably present for me of some of my outward selves in other moments, ones that have occurred; and the longing—the anger at longing and the passionate wish not to long for things but to have them and to be at rest, ashore, asleep, in love, not in love, whatever—is a longing for an absolute, the single absolute thing, the sentence, the one statement, the word, the syllable, the breath of the intention to speak in which the novel, this one, and the moments, and their reality, are encapsulated, are held as purely—well, as sensibly—as a seed in a cotyledon or as a baby in a womb or as my eye in its socket or as, supposedly, I am, in various theologies, held in the eye and mind of God.
But God is here, on Madison Avenue, as fretfully and violently as at Sinai, a majesty that chooses to bother with gender and armies and perhaps with time, time being ITS will—unblasphemously. I am as if in the beard of the ungendered God, whom I see as male like me but then as womanly and engendering a sexual rush.
A love as momentary as the other. I sort of half prayed as I pissed, my arm on the tile wall supporting my bent head, my nose near the tile, my back bent sideways: Let me say something, let me feel something, utterly and singly and simply true . . . free of time, let me love simply . . .
But even as I thought it, as the now brazen, now dimly thunderous, now tinkling piss sounded among the walls, I was in a different place, I was on something like a rocky slope . . . I do not know where I am . . . I do not know if I love her . . . if I will go on loving her. Time, the reality of time in its peculiar deathward motion and eddying and flow, is so full of choices that one chooses, with a dry will, choicelessness: The world is . . . My psyche is . . . Love is . . . something or other, fixed: a fixed pattern.
But it is not as when I was a child: formulas and quotes quiet nothing. The hiss of time—not entirely audible—a goose and vortex in the sea whir, and a flowering rush—and suddenly (it wasn’t exactly sudden) I am in possession of my professional senses: I am on the slope now of a kind of sobriety—or at least of my waking senses—that my mind, wandering—bedouin, skeptical, violent—saw in the dark the downward shapes of the front of my body in this posture and the line of piss in the shadows and the unlit, eviscerated moon of the toilet bowl.
Holy, holy, holy be thy name. The toneless music of the moments—and that of the piss—in the shadows—the toneless music of the shadows themselves—and me supporting myself on my arm—my happiness—I considered my happiness—and the lion of presence lying in the john. God’s lion, the tiles—lying, lying, fabulating and in me the whir of pigeons, of bugs, of leaves, of windy gusts of dead leaves, of dust, the curious motion-ignoring stillness—emotions in their motions . . .
Spirals and alightings, subsidings, heavy displays of substance as they sink underwater in both a willed stillness and a kind of fixity of some parts of one’s fate—as in having feet if one does have feet—one calls out—as if calling out were a jetty and words were stones to build a further levee or dike—were a breath of holiness, that is to say, if holiness were not time—“ORA, YOU DIDN’T TIGHTEN ON ME.” How curious speech is: one means, Be sensible, let’s be sensible, let’s be sensible and immortal—and absolutist.
How one longs to be right in some universe-wide way. One prays, Dear God, show me just Your Little Finger . . . I am not asking for anything th
at will alter history. And then lonely and upset—coerced and owned by restlessness and duty—coerced and owned by reality—and sexually not emptied—and one feels her footprints, the cunt sense, the sexual stuff all over oneself and in oneself, and one’s mind is half-owned by her—and by an unbreathing sense that she had intruded on the orgasm, she had not tightened—the young man jerked off—quickly: readied and sore. I jerked off: with this reason—in order not to be jealous, in order to be at peace enough that I would not assail her—that she might find me interesting, mysterious, other, unlike what she expects.
I want to own myself.
I find myself in this odd trolling and dim and dumb cast for a half-lost self—is that it?—the earlier man, the one who fell into the hallucinations I have wakened from, been expelled from? The one who entered the garden is not the one who left it, angels with flaming swords at the gates. Flaming and sore-pricked, flamingly genitalled, sorely, I thought of some dirty representations of sex—absolute notions of sexiness: books, pictures. I did not think of her (Ora) but of fucking in this or that famous poem and infamous one.
Something left over rose in the blood at once. Shame and insolence, the oddly fluttering privilege in me (of being young), the not-yet-sufficiently-dulled radiance—the strained, onrushing stain of invidious individuality—as if individuality were a denial of death—or more as if embracing death and lifelessness and not procreation and the generations—not my life with her . . . The bad and rebellious—but favored—son, I, came a little bit At my own will—God and Ora be damned. Time can go to hell. I came a little bit. Only. And it hurt. Squeeze. Peer in the dark. Drop the cigarette in the toilet bowl, in the urine, the sperm. Flick one’s thumb . . . Breathe. Notice the odors—of the city through the open window—the tile—the stuff in the toilet bowl—my own ruttishness. What is stirring in my bowels distends and hurts me: Let the law rule . . . The blasphemy was private and is not meant to shock anyone now: the toilet paper was a strange commentary on the Torah—not blasphemous. We proceed among the procedures of time—to clean my thumb finally, and the back of the toilet seat. The flush produces a local vortex. Ah, God, the mind needs a laboratory limitation of factors.
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