It Takes a Thief

by Niels Hammer

  “As all honest men?”

  “Doubt Truth to be a Liar, but never doubt I love.”

  “But it is the earth that moves.”

  The last word – a diagnostic characteristic – but as the relevance of his obsecrations lessened the force of attraction became inversely proportional to the square of the distance and as in a lucid dream he felt how – without having been conscious of taking any decision to act – slowly – slowly their fingers became interlaced – till he touched the strings of her heart with his fingertips and she enclosed him in the hollow of her wifely palm. The tangible universe moved in one direction only. She was leaning forward – and he waited with suspended breath – she was cocking her head – and he waited with suspended breath – till her face filled all space and her lips fused with his to melt them together. Twice he inhaled sharply through his nose to fill his lungs with air before he began probing her teeth with his tongue. The physical reality was a precise reflection of the inner reality so there could never be any dichotomy – just an extension – in another octave – and then a superposition of two standing waves. Lips of icy fire – lips of flaming snow – tongues of entwined twitchings and long lithe sweeps. Lily-of-the Valley hued – pearly smooth – the ridge of her even teeth – but her spittle had still the flavour of the Heather honey in the tea. The first – the pristine kiss – accentuated by the colour of past yearnings and suggesting the shape of future commitments – expressed the desire to unite here and now as well as the tenderness of being aware that all such golden joys were bound to come to dust. When lack of oxygen forced them to pause for breath he plumbed her ear’s pink seashell with his tongue – Seirēnes singing on the skerries – songs of shipwrecks on stormy full-moon nights – tales of watery changes that metamorphosed lives by loss of conscious constructions in the currents beyond the coral reefs. Pulling him closer she inhaled the musky odour of his morning skin and formed green succulent images of wild growth and starry visions of a masculine counterpart that would make her hale and holy as a woman for a human while. He stretched himself out aligned with the way the light mellowed to accept that which was bound to happen as an inevitable continuation of causality – and she confirmed her destiny to fulfil the potentialities of their interactions – for while he had wooed and won her from afar with diligence and perseverance – fiery words and yearning glances – she was now wooing him by manifesting herself as pure activity. Holding his head in her hands she closed her eyes to tremble with the prospect of having cut all mooring cables to embark on the last leg across the shoreless ocean of reciprocal events. Feeling her weight like running waters he traced his hands along her back and her neck to caress her till she goose-fleshed with too keen an aching to exist. And inhaling his breath diaphragmatically she cradled his neck in the web of her fingers of palpating empathy and stroked her thumbs across his cheeks to saturate her memory with the features of his face – but wriggling backwards a little later to take her turn she tempered her growing impatience by knowing the inevitable outcome as an apodeictic truth which gave him the security he needed to be patient. A soft thud – a softer thudding – this way and that – her teasing or ardent one-pointedness. There was nought else but this – so she traced down the be-all and the end-all of her innate wanting to unfold in multifoliate stimuli. The sudden plop of a frog jumping down from the brink had come from somewhere far away – though less than a foot outside of the hull. Feeling how he chilled her through and through – the purring echoes that rippled through her lips – she lay still to savour the sensation of having him where she wanted to have him – and the glow that oozed outwards from the mutual pressure spread to make her skin scintillate in mother-of-pearl-like hues. Looking into his eyes she sought to dissolve the distance between them and it began like time to disappear as they transcended their mental confines. At long last they were clinging so closely together that she could soothe him with the lullaby of a heavy sun-warmed morning swell – but a little later – intensifying the rhythm – though almost imperceptibly – she delineated the suggested shapes and saturated the latent tints of her affective disposition to fulfil the sensations she had evoked when he tore off her mask and saw her face for the first time. Lingering in the distance of their accelerating interchange of sensations – like a melting snowflake on the eyelashes – there remained a note of astonishment at still being able to hear the calls of the two Cuckoos – at still being able to wonder at the degree of intimacy they had achieved – but it was an inexorable corollary of not being cocooned in expectations. Their thoughtscapes had vanished in the air as she had dissolved the various images he had had of her and he had blown away the mutating notions she had had of him. That was mutual awareness – not mutual understanding. But knowing full well the death to come that fostered all meaning she explored the stimulation potential – the belly-dancing of systole and diastole – gravity and buoyancy – however – the affective states would remain as basic tonics but the sensations were Protean and only a few congealed to reach the level of concepts – so the odd flotsam and jetsam that did crystallise out would merely become seamarks to intrigue the recollection later. She swirled around him to expel downwards and further the pulsations till she felt his heart beat in her breast. Immediate communion dissolved the distance to the Sky above – to the slow current along the keel – to the Alders on the brink and to the Sedge Warbler in the thicket and as they continued and paused awhile to continue probing this closeness they discovered that they did not any longer feel constrained by body boundaries. Where he was and where she was had no longer any spatial relevance. There was only a feeling of extension as their combined existence merged with the universal flow of that which was.

  She sat awhile to redden her blood with the vapour of pale blue oxygen but as he looked up from her plenilune knees to her smouldering eyes she tempered the friction by arising from the boards and descending from the leaves. The whispers of the wind in the canopy – the liquid trills of a Curlew overhead and the faint whine of a pair of Pratt and Whitneys in the far-off distance were audible in the lulls. She in-formed him with her movements so that he would not be able to breathe without them and quickened the ripples of her muscles. A bubble was borne away upon a purling stream – a feather upon the breath of a strengthening wind. She glistened with sweat in the yellow morning light – her tresses swung around her cheeks and the boards in the bottom of the boat creaked under the strain. With wide open eyes he drank in the sight of her soaring flourish. Her pupils were aflow with soul-black bliss – and a Tigress’ dark and nasal auṃ – burst out from between her lips as an indication of his sway upon her being in this world. Stunned by the impact of what he had inspired her to do she sat still with half-closed eyes – but fell forward a little later to stretch herself out upon him and relax. Her heart beat was heavy and rapid – she was breathing deeply and smelling of sweat and flowery perfume. Stroking her neck he saw out of the corner of his eyes her eyelashes sweep upwards as she lifted her head to look at him and smile inly knowing that she had made his imagination pale.

  When it became too warm he woke to recognise that he was lying on his back in a boat on the arm of a river with the woman whom he had thought about day and night sleeping soundly upon his breast. The white whish of dragonflies – the dark drones of bumblebees flying around outside the mosquito net and the heart-piercing peals of a female Lapwing somewhere on the brink just behind the trees saturated the air in their shaded shelter. How far away had that place or that presence gone where they had just met – matched and mated? And yet they would both bring back the sensation to consolidate everything they would do and say in the future. It would remain an experience that determined and transformed all subsequent experiences – the touchstone of their actions – but even now the clear conscious memory of it had begun to fade and only silhouettes were left behind as fleeting tokens. It had arisen as a gradual oscillation in which conceptualisations – space and time all were combined in a pratyayaḥ
– concept – image – that arose and disappeared – but gradually the intervals of plain awareness between the pratyayāḥ persevered till only an objectless state seemed to ex-ist. In the same way the descent had come – a pratyayaḥ persisted for a while and vanished. Then it came again but remained a little longer until there only was a flow – like now of innumerable pratyayāḥ – conceptions – images – thoughts – words – notions and ideas. As she lifted her head to see if he were still asleep he kissed her till she lost her breath and had to disengage her neck from his embrace.

  “Whatever I could say now would be superfluous and there is no reason to compromise the ineffable by trying to suggest what it was like or what it might become like in the future.”

  Words – words – words – and he had already done that to some extent.

  “No, but I would like to hear you say something.”

  “As a confirmation?”

  “I’m not so coy about using words as you are. Women have to be practical, though it does not matter all that much, but considering everything that has happened, and how I have changed, so abruptly, I had to release my feelings unhindered by considerations; and that was also the best way to clarify my sincerity and establish a balance between us; I felt eager to match you and even to make amends as I regretted the way I had treated you, for my aggressive behaviour or perhaps my frightened reactions might have made you wary of coming too close to me, at least subconsciously.”

  There had been a soft mischievous sheen in her rapid glance.

  “No, on the contrary, for lying on a bed of thorny roses I thought that I had better get away but I felt so attracted that I just wanted you to hold me so close forever – ”

  “Even in spite my rage?”

  “The fact that you could be so ruthless was exhilarating and it had the impact of confirming that when you did something, whatever it might be, then you did it with every fibre of your body and with your whole being welded into a single arc of energy. That was at least the image I had when you approached me after dropping your parcels on the floor.”

  “Like you might have watched an acrobat perform a particularly daring or difficult feat, or listened to an actress saying a couple of lines of poetry with immaculate finesse?”

  “To some extent, but the knowledge that it was real, that is was you, did not just sharpen my senses, but gave our interaction a surrealistic or dreamlike intensity.”

  It was fair enough now to delineate the peripheral events. The suchness of their communion remained shared and silent – ineffable.

  “So did the tale of your search and your ordeal. That you found me was apparently a miracle, but it was really due to several chance events; that my excitement when you tore off my mask revealed my childhood accent; that you had a flashlight lying on your bedside table; that the light of the flashlight reached in behind my teeth and revealed the scar, that you could recognise it as such and that the defensive kick I gave you made you imagine that I was an ardent judoka, but it was first and foremost because you were so susceptible to me as a woman. What followed was caused by your perseverance and ingenuity, and on a deeper level by your whole-heartedness; but you could only reach your goal because you knew a doctor who was willing to help you, and because you had a friend with the right connections. However, you certainly have a constructive imagination and a penchant for finding a solution even if in a predicament, for though you were far too astonished to make any resistance and I had all the initiative when we fought it did not deter you from catching my attention, even to such an extent that you succeeded in making me lose my balance; but on the other hand, if I had not hit my head so badly I would just have pushed your legs aside and sat up. But then, just as soon as you had time to reflect you associated the way I had engaged you with a stray remark you had heard about a burglary and a corpse with a dislocated shoulder, and on the basis of that you deducted that I must have been responsible both for the burglary and the injury. I have to retell it to believe it. Because you had the power to decide my fate and the grace to abide by my decision even though you already had won me as in a tournament against the difficulties confronting you, I knew that it was my turn to win you by showing you what I felt and by what I could make you feel; but that is, of course, just a reappraisal of what was a spontaneous desire to act towards you as you had acted towards me.”

  “Well, I have to look at you constantly to believe that you’re here, but what will you do now?”

  “Finish the last sandwiches and have another cup of tea. This tea is really good, fragrant.”

  “Are you tired?”

  “Yes, let’s go back.”

  “You can rest awhile here while I paddle.”

  “Can I?”

  Her eyes were already closing and when he had kissed each of her eyelids twice he dressed and began paddling to get out of the rill. The chorus of the early morning had died away but sporadic outbursts of song showed that some warblers already had satisfied their hunger on Nematocera and berries though the berries hardly could be plentiful yet. A few white fluffy clouds drifted across the Roller blue Sky above and dodging the low hanging Rowan by lifting the branches up with the blade of the oar he yawned deeply. The lack of sleep that had been overcome by the intensity of the events became now when the crescendo was ebbing out so acute that he felt he would fall asleep if he did not concentrate continuously on staying awake. There were fresh ripples on the river now as the wind was beginning to gather strength in the shortening rays of the Sun. So his budding hopes had turned bright green but he could not claim that it had been a miracle because the odds had been favourable in all three searches – and yet – the only parameter that mattered – her character and innate disposition – had determined the outcome – but he must have been very open or perceptive to have caught a notion of that when he saw her face in the beam from the flashlight. And then she had been so alive and impressionable that his feelings for her had influenced her affective states – but it seemed nevertheless to have been a miracle and to believe in it he had again and again to rub his eyes and look at her as she lay there sleeping peacefully like a child behind the dull-green mosquito net. Right here and right now all was well with his world – but whether she would remain sweet and yare depended both on his ability to kindle her desire as well as on her craving for excitement – but then again – he had regardless of all such superficial reflections – an impression of trust and integrity that had intensified the more they had come to know each other. The actual span of time did not matter very much for it was the depth of the interchange of emotions that was determinative. The Yellow Waterlilies there had not begun to bloom yet but their soft orbicular leaves – floating upon the slightly undulating surface of the water – shaded the shallows from the hot rays of the Sun which now midstream gave the river the same absorbing depth of Peacock or Marsh Gentian blue as the Sky had at zenith – but in the speckled shadows of the trees along the eastern brink the open stretches of darksparkling water had become shifting mirrors that momentarily reflected the leaves the wind moved – the Mute Swans and the Mallards that swam around to feed on the abundance of life the Waterlilies nourished – and the Barn Swallows that here and there skimmed the surface tension for a mouthful of emerging mosquitoes. Life and death – a play of kaleidoscopic manifestations of the underlying level of consciousness that transcended itself in all its reflections. When he began fastening the moorings she was instantly fully awake – not like him – semi-conscious for half an hour before he knew who and where in the world he happened to be.

  “That was nice! Here, let me take that?”

  When he had placed the bag – the mattress and the blanket on the jetty they carried it all – spontaneously seeing the same causal necessity – up to the car. The very ordinariness of driving home with her sitting just beside him as if she had done that for years already made him smile.

  “What’s so funny?”

&
nbsp; Yawning she stretched her herself backwards. A Cat with extended claws.

  “Driving back like this now seems to be so homely if juxtaposed to that which we’ve just felt.”

  He parked the car and they stumbled out suddenly more tired together than apart.

  “That’s a starling, isn’t it? So soft and variable – ”

  “Oh yes! He has a low-key song into which he blends many different sounds such as snarls and trills, and the more you listen to it the more complex the pattern appears to be. And there is actually a kind of grammar in the song. Mainstream linguistics would like to believe that so-called recursive centre-embedding is hard-wired into the human brain and unique for human language.”

  “What’s centre-embedding?”

  “In Chomskian linguistics recursive centre-embedding is only relevant to human languages as Humans have a unique ability to use it by means of computational processes. Take a sentence like ‘when I met you I fell in love with you’ and ‘when I met you, that fatal May morning three weeks ago, I, who woke to see you move towards me as I lay in my bed, fell in love with you,’ the two sentences ‘that fatal May morning three weeks ago’ and ‘who woke to see you move towards me as I lay in my bed’ are embedded in the original sentence ‘when I met you I fell in love with you.’ But Starlings can make a song, and diverge from a part in it to add a qualifying or extra element, before continuing with the song just like Humans can when they use language to express themselves. Furthermore, there are theoretical flaws in such a view; the assumption that the neurones of the brain only function in simple on-off states, and that human language is unique. In nature there are hardly any sudden jumps, merely graduations and modifications; anyway, all forms of expression, such as songs and gestures, evolved in the anterior cingulate cortex in close association with social awareness. So given the common neuroanatomy of Mammals but also of birds it’s idiosyncratic to find category differences between human and non-human animals. It’s as always a question of degree. While such considerations in no way enhance the beauty of the song, they may make us aware of how we overestimate and even deceive ourselves because of a lack, not only of knowledge, but of empathy and ability to listen to such an extent that we become the song we’re hearing and sense how it is to be a Starling.”