by Niels Hammer
“Were you worried?”
“I did not think I would come through the night alive, fearing the worst and assuring myself of your competence. I was flung to and fro between Spring-green hope and Death-grey despair.”
As she jumped down into the boat he embraced her and left anxiety behind on the Earth to pass the clouds but when she gasped for breath he fishtailed down to kiss her till she laughed.
“Have you hidden the jewellery?”
“On the brink where we moored and at a depth of half a metre together with everything else.”
In the bag he found the bottle and the glasses.
“I was quite annoyed because she had changed her routine, but I have no idea why she did that.”
The cork flew out over the sky-pale water with a hollow sound and he filled their glasses full of joy from the neck of the leaf-dark bottle.
“Maybe she had won quite a bit and wanted to get home to store her catch?”
Their glasses touched as their lips touched as their hands touched.
“Anyway, I rushed down the road and it only took me twenty minutes to reach her house, but before I did that I stopped and looked around till I found a place where I could hide the receiver. The house was ablaze with light and there was a car I did not like parked outside, but her car was parked in the driveway so that gave me a fair measure of hope. I think she must have come home soon after we had gone, and that the dog still had been dizzy when she came, or she might even have found him lying semi-conscious in the grass where we had left him. Anyway, it must have been the behaviour of the dog that aroused her suspicion. Having examined the content of her caskets straightaway she would have phoned for help, around, say, half past eleven or twelve. The car outside her driveway, the lateness of the hour and all the lights in the house seemed to indicate a preliminary investigation, so a more thorough one could very well be launched early in the morning. As I wanted to find the transmitter as soon as it was safe to do so I could not come back to tell you. I drove idly around in the neighbourhood but crossed the road with regular intervals thinking about how nervous you would be and regretting not being able to communicate by telepathy. When the suspiciously looking car had disappeared I retrieved the receiver. As it had only been protected from the rain in a plastic bag that was too small I was worried about whether it had become too wet to function, but it worked so the transmitter had presumably not been removed from her car. Furthermore, I thought that she would have let the dog into the house because of the rain and the sense of security his company would give her, so I placed my bicycle behind the large Hawthorn on the path going down to the river south of her house. There was nobody on the road and when I had scrutinised the garden I climbed up over the gate and walked on tip-toe up to the car – knelt down and found the transmitter where I had placed it. A minute later I climbed the gate again and went down to my bicycle.”
“What have you done with the receiver and the transmitter.”
“Dismantling the plastic cover I deposited them in litter bins at the wharf in Wroxham.”
“And what made you decide to wait for me here?”
“I could not wait to tell you. I could not wait to see you and besides, I had no key to the house.”
“I had forgotten to give you the spare set of keys but tried to calm my conscience by imagining that you could come in through one of the small windows in the kitchen.”
“I thought about that, but as soon as I sat down here, at about four o’clock, I fell asleep as I was warm and exhausted.”
“So all’s well that ends well?”
“Yes, but in fact I did not really run any risk at all. Even if the transmitter had been found it would have been very difficult if not impossible to trace it to me and it could only have been used as circumstantial evidence.”
“So it was mainly your sense of perfection that enticed you to retrieve it?”
“Maybe, but it’s always worth while to eliminate even a very small risk, if at all possible.”
“And it enhances the performance, it gives it the finishing touch?”
“I knew you would be the first to understand.”
Impervious by exuberance she reflected his emphatic irony. Right back over the net.
“What shall we do with the transmitters and the receivers?”
“Just hide them like the jewellery when the gold and the platinum have been melted down.”
“But you need eighteen hundred and fifty degrees Celsius for Platinum?”
“I usually borrow a set of oxygen and propane cylinders from a blacksmith in Lowestoft, but occasionally a piece may be worth more as it is, though then there’s always the added risk, of course, as with that bracelet you found. I rarely fail to take such precautions but in this case it was a blessing in disguise that I didn’t.”
“Let’s have something to eat and another glass of Champagne before I collapse.”
“Is it that bad still?”
“It? It could mean several things?”
“Both the effort of ransacking the house and of our communion in the boat.”
“It was the uncertainty about what had happened to you. Anyway, cheers and congratulations!”
“It should be I who congratulate you for I have no doubt left now. You have convinced me.”
“I thought I had done that already?”
“Of course you had, but I wanted you to be my equal in this enterprise just like I have to be your equal in everything you do. Cheers!”
A faint fragrance of nougat – Honeysuckles – musk melons or whiffs of mellow Jambur notes.
“So now you have wooed and won me for good.”
Her smile was freedom from care about what might be found at the foot of the Rainbow.
“Just like you wooed and won me. We’re even once again.”
She knelt down on the stern thwart. Her humour ousted sincerity and her sincerity humour. As he leaned back the tip of her nose touched the tip of his nose. The harmony of the Eternal Return and the linear propagation of the wave. Her molten melting. He caught her breath.
“I’m still very sore. The edge of the transom and your weight. It was rather uncomfortable.”
“I was eager and impatient and that’s just what you want, unmitigated reality. I feel no remorse. That was what you wanted.”
“And I no regret.”
“Even though you’re a thief now and my accomplice?”
“I do not look at it through the prisms of such tainted spectacles.”
“Neither do I of course, but in the eyes of the vegetating majority you will be from now on.”
“What am I to it or it to me?”
“Nothing, as long as no one knows but you and I.”
“If I wrote a story it would just remain a story as we left no tell tale signs, and an individual who has no personal experience of such a specific set of events would regard them as purely fictitious. Such a story could only resonate with our confrères et consœurs.”
“I was not so much thinking about the social aspects as about how you would adjust your image of yourself to what you have done.”
“I have no second thoughts for money stinks of oleic acid and oleic acid is the stench of death. The female whose photograph adorned the dressing table hoarding her worldly glitter might of course have got her wealth winning at the roulette in Monte Carlo, but it’s far more likely that she killed her husband, who doubtless had accumulated money through the suffering and deprivation of his fellow human beings, by constant nagging. Remember what Balzac said.”
“Why do you have such a low opinion of her husband?”
“Wealth is made by shedding the blood of one’s fellow human or non-human mortals, but first of all by destruction of the environment; and the inequality of wealth is suicidal. Do you remember what she looked like? What kind of a man would want to
marry a creature like that, let alone remain being married to her for so long that she has a chance to kill him?”
“He might have died in an accident.”
“Yes, but the basic fact that he married her remains. And that reveals his character tout court.”
“Don’t you think we fashion our explanations to suit our circumstances?”
She was amused by his casuistry as she herself had no need for such elaborate devices.
“To some extent, certainly. However, she will take revenge on the insurance company which deserves all the revenge she can administer; but the basic parameters here speak for themselves in objective terms.”
“To see her is to love her?”
“Yes, birds of a feather – ”
Her lips were warm and her spittle tasted of Champagne. With her arms around his neck she was clinging to him while he embraced her with his glass balanced behind her back.
“You had not expected it would be so exciting, had you?”
“No, and I had not expected that you would be so excited either, and as it excites you so much I am at a loss to suggest something else, something that might have a comparable impact.”
He had not foreseen such a reaction but he ought to have expected it as a natural response.
“I will miss it but I also wanted to show you what you will be missing. On the other hand I have had the good fortune to avoid accidents and statistically an accident might be more likely to occur the longer I continue. It could cause a very serious rupture lasting several years in our lives and it would make you miserable. So it would be wise to leave all such opportunities alone; but as you saw, it is so easy that it’s very tempting.”
“We have, then, two possibilities. Either to make such a venture as this much more foolproof, which would be very difficult, or to discover another way of reaching a comparable degree of excitement. I had imagined that a thorough exposure to Nature could stimulate you in a similar way, but I know now that that would be a very different kind of excitement altogether.”
“But how would you differentiate between these two kinds of excitement?”
“Let’s have another glass and something to eat first.”
She rose to dive in under the tarpaulin – a Vixen creeping in under a fence to a chicken run – wagging her big red bushy tail in anticipation. The water swerved quickly from brink to brink on its way towards the Sea. Emerging from the tarpaulin she handed him two sandwiches.
“You cannot drink, eat and hold on to me at the same time.”
He was hungry. It had given him an appetite as only a full day at Sea could and the best spice in the world was raw hunger. The taste of Gruyère and Watercress mixed with the wheat. Smell and hunger – the two basic circuits of any organism or of any dissipative system if remaining within the blinkers of the presently most popular paradigm. As she sat down beside him and he felt her heat all over again she nodded gently to have her premonition confirmed.
“The main difference is this, whereas the excitement last night was keen and sharp it was partly based on flaunting acquired social conventions, acquired common expectations and patterns, determined by place and time as a function of an acquisition-focused social paradigm, though it was also based on a sense of rectifying an injustice or, much better, of robbing the robber. It was a socially and an ethically inspired emotion that ignited the far deeper emotion of sexual communion or even transcendence. The excitement of the jungle is not socially or ethically determined. It’s existential. A directly right hemisphere oriented affective state and hence in close connection with the limbic system and the periaqueductal grey where all the basic emotions first begin to be differentiated. The social excitement is mainly a left-hemisphere oriented phenomenon, but it spills over into the right hemisphere if it becomes strong enough as it certainly did last night, but if I had been alone it would not have had the same effect. You made it exciting far beyond what I had been able to imagine. And since you are so susceptible a more direct arousal, based on empathy and the play of life and death, might even be better at facilitating transcendence, with or without sexual engagement, as it is not conceived in relative human terms, for it is a direct way of entering into the primordial state, of being in the realm of intrinsic beauty, of feeling wonder at Great Creating Nature.”
“Our adventure last night only suggested a certain degree of existential danger, but you think that the more obvious existential danger in the jungle would act as a stronger stimulus?”
“The danger last night was not really existential, but it was very real as a risk that could make a serious hiatus in our lives. The danger in the jungle is existential but very small. There may be an analogy here between individuals who vie with their peers, who measure themselves with the ruler of their neighbours, who compete in various ways with their associates, and the individual who relates to the absolute, who seeks to epitomise his or her innermost potential, who attempts to reflect infinity and eternity in actions, emotions and thoughts.”
“If one only can go from the former to the latter but not vice versa we should bury all my equipment now and only keep it handy in case of an emergency.”
“The progress is always from physics to the numinous, from mathematics to music, for example Hermann Grassmann or Nicolas Boulanger; and the best way to approach the real world within is by being in Nature, bathing in the forest, shinrin-yoku, either in the jungle or in the Broads.”
“Last night in the boat you gave me a sense of irrevocable certainty, and that feeling has not diminished so only if nature and the jungle fail me or I fail them, and only if we fail to keep up the spirit, should we try to rekindle what we did to-night.”
“Just as you like it.”
“I have spoken.”
She laughed as her spontaneous choice of words from the past expressed a sudden fresh honesty but also because the issue had been settled not only to her satisfaction but to his as well.
“All’s well that ends well.”
Though one day it would not end well. Nothing ever did – all came to dust – but to-day they sat beside each other as the uniform layer of grey clouds began to break up and reveal patches of a Cornflower blue Sky. Her hand was warm and her pulse the pulse of life. The Sun was beginning to sweeten the air and the water in the river. The great Weeping Willow with whose leaves the light fingers of the South-wind played reflected her existence in his universe. She was his lodestar now that he was hers or were they for the time being just mutually orbiting systems? Undecidable propositions. In and out through revolving doors.
“Is there any Champagne left?”
“Since this is an emergency.”
“Which instant in time and space is not unique in presenting a unique emergency?”
“When we have buried everything to-morrow all emergency measures will be obsolete. Then the daily routines will take over and we will live happily ever after, bereft of history.”
“As I said, Fjodor insists that the way we found one another is a fairy tale.”
“It is, but the question of the future will be this: When the excitement of meeting and mating is over, will the days become trivial, will there be enough depth left in them to make us satisfied?”